At a spring 2010 auction preview at Phillips de Pury in New York, a staff member approached Alexandra Mor and inquired about the jewelry she was wearing. When the elegant, raven-haired Mor replied that she had designed the pieces herself, the woman offered to introduce her to Nazgol Jahan, the auction house’s worldwide jewelry director. Suitably impressed, Nazgol featured her designs at a December 2010 auction. Jahan reaffirmed her support by selecting five pieces from Mor’s Signature collection for another auction last December. “Phillips de Pury gave me the confidence and boost to introduce the brand to a bigger audience,” says Mor, who has been designing and producing jewelry for private clients for five years. “Everything happened organically.” Her collection is now available at 1stdibs.com, and she continues to work with private clients on custom commissions.

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The bold, colorful jewels in the Marina B collection may look familiar. Established by Marina Bulgari in 1977, the label has been resurrected by its new owner Paul Lubetsky, owner and CEO of Windsor Jewelers in New York City. With the acquisition, Lubetsky took possession of more than 10,000 original hand-painted renderings and all the original moldings, which have allowed him to exactly reproduce Marina B classics in the same European ateliers that made them decades ago.

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Sipsmith London Dry Gin with botanicals.

Behind the bright blue door of a small white-washed garage in London’s Hammersmith neighborhood resides the first distiller’s license granted in the city for 190 years. Much to the disappointment of its recipients— Sam Galsworthy and Fairfax Hall—the 2008 document was not an elaborately rendered parchment, but a generic, computer-generated slip. Nevertheless, it marked a milestone for the lifelong, 30-something friends and founders of Sipsmith, which produces barley vodka and classic London dry gin in small batches of a few hundred bottles.

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Marc Newson’s artistic oeuvre spans from furniture to cars to jets, but the visionary Australian designer has a particular fascination with time. His Ikepod watch collection stands apart for its organic forms, his sculptural Baccarat crystal-encased Atmos clocks for Jaeger-LeCoultre have revitalized a Deco-era technical wonder, and now he redefines the medieval hourglass with unabashed 21st-century sex appeal. Instead of using Baccarat, Newson commissioned an artisan glass blower in Basel, Switzerland, to form the hourglasses out of borosilicate, a high-tech durable glass used in labs and the aerospace industry. Newson then replaced the sand with millions of stainless steel nanoballs available in four shades. While The Hourglass’ materials are high-tech, the engineering is a refreshingly basic exercise in physics. But timekeeping still has its place—the small version runs for 10 minutes, while the larger tracks an hour. It all depends on how much time you have to waste, as once you flip The Hourglass, you’re sure to be transfixed until the final tiny ball falls.

By Laurie Kahle
4.9.11

Siegelson, a New York City dealer specializing in rare jewelry and objets d’art, possesses a number of precious masterpieces, including this circa 1935 treasure designed by Fulco, Duke of Verdura, and made by Paul Flato, both legends of 20th-century jewelry design. During Hollywood’s golden age in the 1930s and ’40s, tinsel town’s most glamorous starlets, including Joan Crawford and Marlene Dietrich, trusted Flato to make them sparkle.

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Colosimo with watch winder

Colosimo radial locking system

Doettling’s new Colosimo may be the world’s smallest high-security safe, as its German manufacturer claims, but from a design point of view, it’s anything but diminutive, despite dimensions of about 11 inches for height, width, and depth. Doettling spent three years developing its first decorative tabletop safe, which led the company to coin the term “haute safeology.” Named for gangster “Big Jim” Colosimo, who ruled the Windy City’s gangland before Al Capone took over, Colosimo’s bold stature is a nod to the hefty American bank vaults of the Prohibition era, which were built with thick, round steel doors and radially arranged locking bolts. The safe’s intricate and smooth locking mechanism, which features 16 radially arranged bolts and 32 gilded gearwheels, is also reminiscent of a mechanical watch movement, so Doettling offers it equipped with a watch winder (or a humidor if you prefer).

The Colosimo range

When Canadian jewelry designer Reena Ahluwalia envisioned new pieces for Royal Asscher’s Stars of Africa collection, her goal was to create diamond jewelry with “universal” appeal. “To represent this core idea visually, the pieces consist of diamond-filled globes that are encircled by orbit-like elements,” she explains. “The full-globes spin to symbolize the earth’s rotation, while the free-floating diamonds inside represent the shining spirit of people.” The orbits, she adds, signify education, health-care and empowerment—fundamental goals of the Star of Africa initiative, which was established by Royal Asscher in 2008 to raise funds for African healthcare, education, and self-sufficiency programs. Royal Asscher donates $150 from every sale the charitable fund. The project is named for the largest diamond ever found—the 3,105-carat Star of Africa, which the Asscher family cut in 1908.

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