Furmanovich cuts Art Deco from straw and beetle-wing
The Brazilian marquetry house has translated 1920s geometry into straw inlay, Shibayama, abalone and iridescent beetle-wing, a couture-level collection arguing that craft, not carat weight, is the luxury on offer.
By The Design Desk
What changed
Silvia Furmanovich, the São Paulo designer who built a house on the humble craft of marquetry, has turned her wood-and-straw technique on the most geometric decade in decorative history.
What it means
- This is the counter-programming the high end needs right now. As stones lose their scarcity, the houses that will hold their margins are the ones selling something a factory cannot copy overnight, and a beetle-wing mosaic set by hand is about as hard to copy as jewelry gets.
- Furmanovich is betting that when the diamond stops being rare, the labor around it becomes the thing worth paying for.
Key figures
| HouseSilvia Furmanovich, São Paulo | |
|---|---|
| CollectionArt Deco, on the 1925 Paris Exposition centenary | |
| Signaturestraw marquetry (enchapado de tamo) | |
| Also workedShibayama, abalone, beetle-wing, coral, black palm |
Source: On the record · the collection
Marquetry meets the most geometric decade
Her new Art Deco collection, drawn up around the centenary of the 1925 Paris Exposition that gave the style its name, reads the 1920s not through diamonds and platinum but through texture, arranging chevrons, mosaics and spirals in materials most fine jewelers never touch.
The material list is the statement. Straw marquetry, the enchapado de tamo that is the house signature, sits alongside Japanese Shibayama inlay, mother-of-pearl and abalone, iridescent beetle-wing, black palm wood, coral and mirrored surfaces.
Egyptomania and Japonisme, the two exotic currents that fed original Deco, return here as surface and pattern rather than as motif, filtered through the hands of Brazilian and Asian artisans the studio has spent years training.
Chevron, fan and ziggurat, after 1925. Carat Capital graphics desk.
An argument about where value sits
It is a deliberate argument about where value sits.
In a season when the natural-diamond price is falling and the lab-grown stone has made carat weight cheap, a collection that asks to be judged on the difficulty of its making rather than the size of its stones is making a case for craft as the last defensible luxury.
The pieces debuted at Couture in Las Vegas in the spring and have been circulating through the trade press since.
Priced like commissions, not SKUs
"Jewelry has always been a form of cultural exploration," Furmanovich has said, and the collection wears that thesis openly, treating a brooch as a small piece of cabinetry and a cuff as a field for inlay.
The approach does not scale the way a diamond line does, which is precisely the point; each piece is closer to a commissioned object than a stocked SKU, and priced accordingly.