Heritage jewelry houses including Cartier, Tiffany & Company, and Van Cleef & Arpels have a long history of crafting precious objects for the home.
Their archives contain details of extravagant commissions from wealthy clients, for whom no object was too mundane to be beautiful. Even today, for example, Cartier clients can store their jewels in the Libre Tuttitutti lacquered wood box topped with a carved chrysoprase, at $33,600. Or, they can buy a Panthère de Cartier cotton place mat for $225.
But home décor lines aren’t limited to the large global brands. Many independent jewelers have realized the creative and commercial potential of entry-level housewares, adding items to their collections as a way of broadening brand awareness and attracting new clients.
“There’s nothing that you can buy of Carolina Bucci jewelry for 85 pounds, but you can buy a candle,” said Carolina Bucci, a designer who lives and works in London. “We have a lot of people who are addicted to the candles and that’s how they entered the relationship with the brand.”
The container for the Villa Colombo candle ($110), named for Ms. Bucci’s childhood home in Italy, was created by Sbigoli Terrecotte of Florence. She has collaborated with other Italian brands, too: Murano glassware by Laguna B in Venice; marble coasters and spheres from a family-run marble cave in Carrara, and stationery from the 250-year-old Florentine company Pineider inspired by her Lucky bracelets.
“I wanted to find the best in that field to make my vision come to life,” she said. “Because that’s not what I do; I do jewelry. I wanted to find someone else to partner with to lend the craft side. They’re masters of what they do.”
Italian pieces have turned up in other jewelers’ collections, too. Foundrae’s housewares range includes porcelain plates produced by Laboratorio Paravicini in Milan, alongside crystal glassware made by J. & L. Lobmeyr and brass jewelry holders and bookends made by Werkstätte Carl Auböck, both heritage Austrian companies.
Marlo Laz, a fine jewelry brand in Manhattan, began selling Murano glass candles and incense dishes in 2021. Now its line includes heart-shape Carrara marble dishes (from $380) and vintage vases, jars and trays, the kind of pieces that decorate the brand’s store in the West Village.
Jesse Lazowski, the brand’s founder, said clients had inquired about the store’s interiors. “I wanted to offer our collectors the opportunity to bring Marlo Laz into their homes in ways beyond jewelry, and homeware was the natural next step,” she wrote in an email.
In October, the Danish jeweler Sophie Bille Brahe released her second housewares collection, starting at $365 for a candle. It followed her 2023 collection of Murano glass vases, which featured the same spiral and floral motifs of her jewelry and an iridescent sheen reminiscent of pearls, for which her brand is known. “Even though it’s completely different, it has for me the same feeling of something extremely precious,” she said.
She added that housewares were another way for her to express her creativity, and for her clients to experience the brand: “I think somehow with jewelry it’s really important to create the feeling of the whole universe.”
That sentiment was echoed by Anna Jewsbury, the founder of Completedworks, a London brand that, in 2018, released its debut ceramics range in collaboration with Ekaterina Bazhenova-Yamasaki, an artist who lives and works in London and Los Angeles. “Having multiple categories just gives you a bit more breadth,” Ms. Jewsbury said. “It’s another way to connect with people.”
There are aesthetic parallels between the brand’s gold-vermeil jewelry, which often feature zirconia, resin and pearls, and its housewares: ceramic mugs ($82) and candlesticks that appear soft and puffy, sculpted resin boxes that resemble fabric, and glass that looks as if it is melting. “Our sensibility is kind of trying to make something quite classic, but with subversive undertones, or something strange going on,” Ms. Jewsbury said.
Pandemic lockdowns increased housewares sales, Ms. Jewsbury said, and now the category accounts for as much as a quarter of the brand’s annual revenue, which she declined to disclose.
In contrast, Anissa Kermiche, who started her brand in London with jewelry in 2016, said its revenue now was split almost equally between housewares and jewelry.
“To me, if a home was a woman, the clothes would be the furniture and the homeware would be the jewelry,” Ms. Kermiche said. “It’s literally the final touch that brings the shine and the bling and the personality.” Her best sellers are ceramic pots and vases in the shape of female torsos and buttocks (from $75), the equivalent of her gold-plated Rubies Boobies and La Derrière pendants.
She said that she had designed both categories at the same time, but that production of the ceramics took much longer. “Business-wise, it was much easier to manage jewelry from almost like a drawer, a cupboard,” she said. “Whereas it took kind of like an airport and a really big warehouse to manage the homeware.” Now, she plans to put into production a range of metal chairs shaped like bodies, a set of which, she said, already are on display in her showroom.
Other jewelers have avoided such problems by producing their housewares themselves. For example, since the 1940s, the American jewelry brand Seaman Schepps has carved boxes, bowls, trays, flowerpots and pen cups from hard stones including agate, aventurine, rose quartz and obsidian, and then decorated them with gemstones or antique shell cameos. Its Home collection starts at $750 for a carved hard-stone clock.
And goldsmiths in the Copenhagen workshop of the Elhanati jewelry brand have crafted sterling silver cutlery in floral patterns embellished with spinels and diamonds (from $567), the result of a collaboration between the Danish jeweler and the Argentine artist Conie Vallese. “I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of transforming the ordinary into something magical,” said Orit Elhanati, the brand’s founder.
She said that despite the precious materials, the cutlery was designed to be used. “Cutlery and objects are something we touch, like, every day,” she said, “but it should also be something that, I don’t know, delights us or that feels luxurious.”
She added that the cutlery was designed to become a family heirloom, something that brings the same “joy and intimacy” as a piece of gold and diamond jewelry.
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