THE MUZO REGENT
THE MUZO REGENT
A sugarloaf emerald and diamond necklace, ten years in the collecting.
Ten years ago, I began setting aside emeralds that most cutters wouldn't touch. Not the flat, faceted stones that move through auction houses by the thousand, but sugarloaf cabochons — domed, four-sided, cut the old way, the way lapidaries worked before the market decided facets sold faster. Rough good enough for a sugarloaf has to be clean enough to survive losing none of its weight to angles that hide inclusions. Today, with Colombian rough prices where they are, far fewer people cut this shape anymore. It isn't profitable. So collecting seven fine, certified Muzo emeralds this way wasn't a purchase — it was a decade of patience.
I didn't want this piece to belong to a gender. From the first sketch, the intention was unisex: a necklace a man could wear into a boardroom and a woman could wear into a gala, neither reading as borrowed from the other's wardrobe. That decision shaped everything after it — the scale of the stones, the weight of the gold, the restraint in the palette.
The second decision was harder to hold onto: I wanted the gold to show itself. In an era where pavé often exists to erase the metal beneath it, I kept faceted rose gold links moving between the diamond and emerald stations, so the necklace catches light in three distinct rhythms rather than one continuous glare. It reads modern and classic at once, with an Art Deco geometry underneath — the same instinct that made Deco jewelers alternate hard architectural lines with soft cabochon stones.
The idea took two years to resolve into something worth building. The build itself demanded 1,920 diamonds totaling 5.84ct, D–F, VVS/VS, each micro hand-set into its setting rather than machine-pressed — two full months of a setter's hands and nothing else. Seven sugarloaf emeralds anchor the design, each one a small negotiation between what the rough allowed and what the design demanded.
It isn't a piece that can be repeated easily. The stones alone would take years to reassemble at this grade, and the hand-setting isn't a process you can compress without losing what makes it look the way it does.
DETAILS
- Metal: 18k rose gold, 49.12g
- Diamonds: 1,920 pcs: 5.84ct total, D–F, VVS/VS, excellent cut, micro hand-set
- Emeralds: 7 fine-grade certified Muzo Colombian emeralds, sugarloaf cabochon, 15.78ct total
- Design & development: 2 years
- Setting: 2 months, full-time, hand-carved
Price on request