TEXT by Amanda Vaill

Ella Gafter is a contemporary designer who knows how to give dimension to a monochromatic palette. Although she began her career in Rome as a dealer in gemstones-particularly diamonds and emeralds-she became fascinated by pearls and soon became one of the worlds foremost experts, with pieces in recent exhibitions at the American Museum of Natural History and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. And she knows how to create excitement by using different kinds of pearls in a single piece. Gafter plays on these differences in a necklace of exquisitely matched Japanese Akoya pearls that in other hands might have been merely perfect: She punctuates them with a with a diamond pendant on which an effulgent Australian pearl blooms, with another fat beauty trembling below it. An unexpected feature of the design is that the "lozenge," as Gafter's daughter and partner, Talila, calls the pendant, can be detached and worn separately as a brooch.