A Cabinet of Curiosities on Canyon Road

Whenever I'm in the Netherlands, I make a pilgrimage to Haarlem, and in particular to Teylers Museum. Inside the country's oldest museum sits the Oval Room, opened in 1784 and arranged almost exactly as it was then. A central case of eighteenth-century minerals is ringed by brass-and-glass scientific instruments, with a gallery of leather-bound encyclopedias overhead. Nearby stands a colossal electrostatic generator built the same year, once the largest in the world. For a rock nerd who has also always been obsessed with scientific instruments, it is as close to heaven as it gets.

Long before there were museums, there were wonder rooms. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emperors, merchants and early scientists filled whole chambers with whatever stopped them in their tracks: mineral specimens, carved stone, scientific instruments, shells, curios both real and imagined. And no one embraced them quite like the Dutch. Ships returning to Amsterdam carried more than spices; sailors brought home treasures from every corner of the globe, and merchants and apothecaries filled their homes with rariteitenkabinetten, cabinets of rarities. Peter the Great (obsessed with the Dutch and all things Netherlandish) was so smitten that he began buying from Dutch collectors in 1697, later acquiring the entire collections of Albertus Seba and Frederik Ruysch to stock his Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg. Collecting and exploring run in my Dutch blood, too. If you remember, my father is from Holland, and those childhood summers in the Netherlands shaped the way I see the world.

So when I designed my library at home in Santa Fe, I loosely modeled it on a scientific room, complete with my own cabinet of curiosities and collections from my travels around the world. Over the years I've gathered a trove of objects and art from antique stores, art shows, galleries, flea markets, junk stores and the like, collecting whatever caught my eye. Let's be honest: jewelry will always be my first language, but a rock nerd's eye doesn't switch off at the edge of the jewel case. Today my library is the coziest room in the house, a place to pull a book from the shelves, settle in front of a roaring fire, and listen to my husband play piano or guitar. My gallery is an extension of this space.

Stone as Objet

When I was dreaming up what would fill my gallery, I wanted every single thing in the space to be about stones and gems. Alongside my own work and the artists I collaborate with, I went hunting for beautiful objets: a mosaic lapis bowl from Afghanistan, a towering pair of rock crystal obelisks made for a mantel or a fabulous shelf, and handcrafted stone boxes for a desk or a dresser.

I lucked out with the boxes. Sleuthing through the Tucson gem show, I came upon a group of Russians selling small, beautiful boxes built from slabs of not just classic malachite, but stones I rarely see outside a mineral cabinet. Astrophyllite, its name Greek for "star leaf," scatters golden-bronze 

starbursts of metallic crystal across pale stone. Seraphinite, mined in a small corner of eastern Siberia, is a deep forest green shot through with silvery, feather-like plumes that shimmer as you tilt it, which is how it earned its name from the seraphim. I was beside myself. These are small, portable archives of deep time, and they beg to be picked up, opened, and lived with. (If astrophyllite's glint looks familiar, it's the same stone that streaks across my Astro Ring and these amazing earrings from the past.)

If the boxes celebrate the surface of a stone, Danny Sanchez goes inside. A GIA-trained gemologist (and former musician), Danny builds each photomicrograph from more than a hundred focus-stacked images, sometimes spending weeks lighting a single gem. Out of every five stones, he's lucky to get one photograph. The patience is staggering. The results are otherworldly: a fracture becomes a nebula, a flash of opal color an entire atmosphere.

When I asked Danny what he saw in my jewelry, he said we "reach for a similar feeling" in our work, and he's right. Every one of my designs begins with the scene I find inside a gem. His ethereal opal image hangs near my Desert Twilight necklace, and the quiet conversation between them is exactly why I wanted his work on my walls. (Read more about his process here.)

Of course, every proper cabinet of curiosities needs a bell jar, and Portland glass artist Andy Paiko has made the form entirely his own. His fully functioning glass instruments (a scale, a seismograph, even a polygraph) look as if they wandered out of the Teylers Oval Room. That's exactly why I spent two years obsessing over his glass scale before it finally took its place in my library cabinet. When I later saw his jars filled with scraps of Murano glass, I knew exactly what belonged inside: specimens from my own cache.

The jars I commissioned each contain a specimen I sourced, from shimmering blocks of pyrite to a rough aquamarine crystal with muscovite growth, inside a one-of-a-kind dome. Andy once told me, "Americans work with their tools, while Italians work with their glass." His work somehow does both. I love setting the pyrite jar near my Pyrite-in-Slate Leather Band Bracelet. One belongs on the mantel, the other on the wrist, and both let the stone do the talking.

The original wonder rooms weren't really about showing off. Well… not only! They were about keeping close the things that made the world feel larger, stranger, and more beautiful. That's what I hope my jewels and these objects do: modern heirlooms for the shelf as much as for the skin.

These are just a few of the beautiful, giftable treasures in my gallery, and I hope you'll come wander the cabinet with me on Canyon Road this season to find the perfect present for yourself or a certain someone. Searching for someone who has everything? Reach out, and I'll happily help you pair a treasure for their home with a jewel for them to wear.