Twenty-five years ago, the reception was skeptical when Silvia Furmanovich introduced her namesake fine jewelry line featuring natural materials, especially wood with gold and gem accents. “Everybody said, ‘This is not jewelry. This is costume jewelry,’” Ms. Furmanovich said recently.
But she persisted. And opinions changed when she began working with artisans from her native Brazil who specialized in marquetry, the decorative art of creating images and patterns by piecing together tiny slivers of wood.
The resulting jewels — with brilliantly colored patterns inspired by the likes of butterfly wings, florals and ikat prints and made with wood from fallen trees, furniture manufacturers’ leftovers and driftwood — now are sold by luxury retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman in New York City and Asprey in London.
Ms. Furmanovich was ahead of the current trend: rediscovering wood as a material for jewelry.
With the price of precious metals skyrocketing and ethical concerns about mining intensifying, wood has become a popular medium across the industry, from the jewelry giant Tiffany & Company, which has reissued some lacquer-coated Japanese hardwood designs by Elsa Peretti, to the independent brand Studio Renn in Mumbai, India.
“I chuckle when I hear about a resurgence of wood jewelry,” said Anthony Hopenhajm, the owner of the American jewelry house Seaman Schepps. “We’ve been using wood since the ’40s.”
A bracelet with links of walnut, rosewood or ebony alternating with ones in 18-karat gold has been one of the brand’s top sellers for about 80 years, he said (from $19,500). Over the years variations of the design have been introduced, including a red carpet-ready diamond and ebony version that commands a six-figure price.
Mr. Hopenhajm checked off the material’s virtues: “Wood is a neutral. You can wear it with anything. Wood is light. It gives you decorative volume but won’t weigh you down. There’s a warmth about wood — it’s why people use it in decorating their homes.”
Ruth Peltason, the author of the 2010 book “Living Jewels,” about jewelry in organic materials, said the popularity of wood had been cyclical. “We see wood again and again,” she said.
The influential 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes and the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale, both in Paris, displayed wood artistry in architecture, jewelry and more, owing to “a big response to ‘tribal arts,’” she said, an inheritance from colonies including modern-day Senegal, Mali and Guinea.
Then, “we see it again in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” Ms. Peltason said, referring to the vogue for beaded wooden jewelry. “That was really a counterculture, bohemian look.”
Now, she said, a heightened consciousness about the origin of jewelry materials has rekindled the fashion. “There’s interest in respecting natural materials.”
Strong Roots
Fernando Jorge said a reverence for materials was central to his nine-piece Deep Stream collection, a mix of 18-karat yellow gold, brown diamonds and wood from his native Brazil. Introduced this past fall, it was an extension of his 2014 Stream collection.
The relatively lightweight nature of the wood was a logical choice for an assortment that included large earrings and a bold cuff that would be heavy to wear if made entirely in gold: “Due to the scale, wood became a natural choice, and a native Brazilian wood sourced from the Amazon was even more meaningful,” he said by email.
He selected the specific wood — Red Louro, which has the scientific name Ocotea rubra — “for its beautiful reddish-brown hue and natural properties, such as clean grain and resilience.”
According to Sarah Emilie Müllertz, a Danish designer, architect and jewelry maker, working with wood was an intrinsic part of her brand, called Kinraden, from its start in 2014. Concerned about the possibility of “sustainability and environmental consequences of using gemstones,” she said she began experimenting with jewelry making when she discovered mpingo, a black heartwood primarily used for woodwind instruments such as oboes and clarinets.
To produce Kinraden’s jewelry, Ms. Müllertz buys off-cuts from musical instrument manufacturers that, in turn, get the material from a Forest Stewardship Council-certified forest in Tanzania that is protected by World Wildlife Fund programs. “It was very important that it’s upcycled material and that we do everything in a sustainable way,” she said.
Her first designs featured wood cut to resemble conventional gems, such as an 18-karat gold signet ring set with a faceted wood accent ($3,120). More recently, pieces have featured mpingo wood as striped insets in rings and in bracelets of recycled sterling silver or 18-karat yellow gold. “The designs I’m doing are very simple, of course, rooted in my architectural background,” she said. “And in the Scandinavian tradition, I strive for simplicity.”
The recent designs in wood by Ana Khouri, an artist and jewelry designer in New York City, have been an adventure in upcycling. In 2020, Ms. Khouri repurposed an old piece of rosewood furniture from her family’s home outside São Paulo, Brazil, making pieces such as a sculptural bib necklace embedded with a 10-carat diamond and a carved egg-shape minaudière. Rosewood, several species of which now are protected by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), has a reddish color and a distinct, “buttery” feel, she said.
Now, she searches online and at auctions for more furniture to remake. Among the pieces she completed last year were a high jewelry necklace featuring a curved length of rosewood suspended from a series of 15-millimeter South Sea pearls, a one-off wide band ring set in gold with a rubellite solitaire ($44,000) and some limited edition designs.
One of the virtues of working with rosewood, Ms. Khouri said, is the individuality that each piece conveys within her designs. “I always want to bring materials that are as natural as possible to the world of high jewelry and emphasize their richness and the care that goes into the concept behind each piece,” she said. “It’s not just about adding up carats.”
Low-Key Cool
Nina Runsdorf, a jewelry designer in New York City, used remnants of Argentine rosewood that she got from furniture manufacturers as the centerpiece of her L’été de la Mer collection, introduced in late 2023.
She said she chose the material to infuse the breezy, sophisticated mood evident in Slim Aaron’s photos of the 1960s and ’70s into her assortment of oval pendants suspended from 18-karat gold wires, drop earrings edged with diamonds and link bracelets (from $2,350).
The jewels are less expensive and showy than they would have been in gold and precious stones, something that she said gives peace of mind to her clients. “People don’t want to travel with their big jewelry; they’re concerned” about safety, she said. “When they’re wearing jewelry in wood, they love it and still consider it precious because it has gold.”
Sometimes, the allure of wood is a mix of pure sensual attraction and understated chic. Marie Lichtenberg, who introduced her brand five years ago in Paris with hexagonal lockets and later expanded to a full assortment of fine jewelry, has been going all in on ebony.
In the past year, she has introduced plaque-style pendants, charms, a ring and an earring featuring ebony (from $2,720). She plans to release more designs this year. “Ebony is a noble wood,” she said. “When you polish it, there’s a shine that you can’t get anywhere else. It’s just simplicity and beauty. To me, it’s the quietest luxury ever.”
Preparing the dark wood for placement in her jewelry can be laborious, however, and a single artisan in Italy executes all her ebony jewelry. “It is such a specific savoir-faire,” she said, involving hydrating and then drying the wood before painstakingly cutting it.
Even so, she has a somewhat laissez-faire attitude toward keeping her pieces pristine. She usually wears a pair of necklaces with large dice pendants in ebony and diamonds, and noted that the occasional dings in the wood’s surface were part of its allure.
“I think it ages very well,” she said. “It’s like a beautiful chair or a beautiful table. It needs to feel lived in, right? Otherwise, there’s no point.”
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