Holiday Hours
Monday - Saturday 10am - 5pm, Sunday 12pm - 5pm or by Appointment
The firm of Georges Lenfant is widely acknowledged to be one the finest and most gifted goldsmiths of the 20th century. With an innate understanding of style there is a combination of outstanding craftsmanship and chic.
In particular the use of different colored gold in finely woven wire became a technique that many tried to emulate but never quite achieved to the same level. The name of Georges Lenfant is now one of the most collectible names and has without question established itself in the Pantheon of jewelry design.
Founded in the early 20th century they originally made pieces for houses such as Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels and Mellerio dits Meller. After the Second World War they took over the workshops of Verger Frères another exceptional atelier to establish a manufacturing powerhouse. At this time the firm had been handed over to Georges’s son Jacques and where they started to create pieces independently from the big retail houses.
Simon Teakle Fine Jewelry is honored to exhibit at Masterpiece London.
Masterpiece London is the unmissable art fair at which visitors can view and buy the finest works of art, design, furniture and jewellery - from antiquity to the present day. The fair will be held at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, June 27 - July 3, 2019. For further details regarding directions, parking and fair hours, please visit masterpiecefair.com
The gallery is delighted to provide complimentary tickets for the fair; please leave your details below and we will be in touch to coordinate.
Featured: A pair of antique natural pearl and diamond bracelets, c. 1860
Simon Teakle Fine Jewelry is honored to exhibit at Masterpiece London.
Masterpiece London is the unmissable art fair at which visitors can view and buy the finest works of art, design, furniture and jewellery - from antiquity to the present day. The fair will be held at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, June 28 - July 4, 2018. For further details regarding directions, parking and fair hours, please visit masterpiecefair.com
The gallery is delighted to provide complimentary tickets for the fair; please leave your details below and we will be in touch to coordinate. You may also order tickets directly from Masterpiece using our code ARQO75.
Featured: A magnificent carved ruby and diamond necklace by Marchak, circa 1950
Celebrate your love with a token from the heart.
Choose from a selection of sentimental jewelry, spanning over 500 years, to commemorate your everlasting devotion.
The +/- motif of these "Qu'Hier Que Demain" rings was introduced in French jewelry in the late 19th century and became the ultimate expression of true love.
The + ring, engraved "qu'hier" on the back, and - ring, engraved "que demain" on the back, together declare "I love you more than yesterday, less than tomorrow."
The complete line, written by early 1900s French poet Rosemonde Gérard, is "Car, vois-tu, chaque jour je t'aime d'avantage, Aujourd'hui plus qu'hier et bien moins que demain," which translates to, "For, you see, each day I love you more, Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow."
This exquisite bracelet features bright guilloché enamel panels depicting classic symbols of love.
Collectively known as a Love Trophy: Cupid's quiver of arrows and the hymeneal torch (named after Hymen, the Greek goddess of marriage) are fastened with a ribbon bow, tying two people together.
This perennial bouquet is rendered in fine micromosaic work.
The term micromosaic is used to describe mosaic made of tiny glass pieces, some so fine they will use as many as five thousand pieces of glass per square inch.
The interest in classical archaeology and discoveries of ancient sites in the late 18th and early 19th century triggered a fashion in jewelry. Although many images depict classical mythology and scenery, others represented romantic and symbolic themes.
Posy rings derived their name from “poesy” (poetry) and were engraved with inscriptions expressing love and affection.
These devotional rings were fashionable from the 13th to 17th centuries and most commonly inscribed in either French or Latin, languages commonly used by the elite throughout medieval Europe.
One of these rings expresses "Daurant ma Vie" (all my life), while other commonly used phrases were "forget not who loveth thee" and "a loving wife a happy life"
Simon discusses one of the highlights on display at TEFAF:
A diamond and enamel “Serpenti” watch, the coiled sprung yellow enamel scaled body with circular and nanette cut diamond detail with diamond set tail and head, the hinged mask with ruby eyes revealing a circular dialed watch, movement by Jaeger le Coultre. Circa 1965
Simon Teakle Fine Jewelry is honored to exhibit at TEFAF New York Spring fair. Established in 1988, TEFAF is widely regarded as the world’s preeminent fair of art and antiques. The fair will be held at the Park Avenue Armory, May 4-8, 2017. For further details regarding directions, parking and fair hours, please visit tefaf.com.
We have limited tickets available for the fair. Please contact us at info@simonteakle.com if you are interested.
VOGUE International Editor-at-Large Hamish Bowles wearing an Art Deco emerald and diamond circle brooch, circa 1920, available at Simon Teakle.
This year we have had the pleasure of hosting Holly Fowler as she created and painted wonderful designs in our shop during Fashion Day Out in September and the Holiday Stroll in December. And to further our collaboration, we commissioned Holly to hand paint several pieces of jewelry and objects that adorned this year's Christmas catalog.
Holly Fowler is an English fashion designer based between London and New York specializing in hand painted fashion. Treating the silhouette as a canvas, her paintings play on the body’s contours to produce three dimensional works of art that are adorned with stunning jewelry, flowers and rose covered sashes.
Graduating from Central Saint Martins her graduate collection was bought exclusively by Browns in London and received critical acclaim from fashion press. Her collections are now stocked internationally with exclusive dress lines at Bergdorf Goodman and hand painted shoes and accessories at Browns as well as creating bespoke pieces to order. Her clients include Lady Gaga and Jeff and Justine Koons.
Alongside painting and designing her own label, Holly has worked for Louis Vuitton, Zac Posen, Diane von Furstenberg, Chloe and John Galliano and continues to freelance and consult for various clients
NEW YORK, NY - MAY 04: Livia Giuggioli and Colin Firth attend the "China: Through The Looking Glass" Costume Institute Benefit Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 4, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)
Livia and Colin Firth wearing Art Deco sapphire and diamond dress set
Simon Teakle Fine Jewelry & Objects will exhibit for the first time in New York City at Spring Masters, a fair that brings together leading International galleries from US and Europe, exhibiting art and design from Antiquity through the 21st Century. The fair will be held at the Park Avenue Armory. For further details regarding directions, parking and fair hours, please visit springmastersny.com. We also will have complimentary tickets available for the fair. Please contact us at info@simonteakle.com if you are interested.
Holly Fowler is a young English designer establishing herself cult status. Her extraordinary painting on exquisite fabrics are stunning, unique and outstandingly elegant. With a passion for jewelry, many designs revolve around luxurious gems and jewels that make the collaboration with Simon Teakle a fascinating combination of rare and cool couture. Holly will be at Simon Teakle Fine Jewelry creating new designs and will also be available to work on unique custom creations on Saturday, September 13th. Please join us from 10 - 6 pm, 4 Grigg Street, Greenwich, CT
May 28th, 2014- Vivienne Becker sits down with Simon Teakle at 4 Grigg Street. See the full article on 1stdibs.com
Simon Teakle is the quintessential English gentleman: distinguished, discreet, impeccably mannered and ineffably charming. He also has the perfect pedigree for an antique-jewelry dealer, having worked for 20 years at Christie’s, first in London and then in New York, where he ran the auction house’s jewelry department. So when Teakle branched out on his own two years ago as a dealer in vintage and fine jewelry, the genteel, New England town of Greenwich, Connecticut, proved the ideal location.
Before setting up his eponymous shop, however, he first worked in Greenwich for the noted jeweler Betteridge, starting in 2004. Then, in 2012, “The stars were aligned, the right opportunity came along, and the timing worked in every respect,” he explains. “I had been wandering around Greenwich with my wife, looking at buildings, and I just kept coming back to the same space, a nineteenth-century building, within sight of Greenwich Avenue, that had been part of the old Greenwich fruit and vegetable market.” The one drawback of the space, at 4 Grigg Street? It was already occupied (coincidentally, by a working jeweler). Teakle’s wife, Juliet, decided to go inside, look around and talk to the goldsmith, who told her, to her surprise and pleasure, that he was about to leave the premises. “Within three days,” Teakle says with a laugh, “I had a ten-year lease, my own shop and absolutely no business plan.”
He began by completely gutting the boutique, creating a discreet salon with a comfortably cool, club-like style and sleekly modern vitrines, all expressly designed to display antique and estate jewelry in a contemporary setting. “My aim has always been to show clients that antique jewelry is wearable and modern, that it makes the right statement with today’s fashions,” Teakle says. “It’s the perfect complement to, say, a Prada dress.”
There is, unsurprisingly, a distinctly English feel to the shop, with its muted Farrow & Ball colors; its classic 1950s, ’60s and contemporary fashion photographs; its large sofa covered in rough Indian silk; and its rolling library ladder and stately book- cases. A stunning 18th-century silvered mirror comes from Wardour Castle, the ancestral Dorset home of his wife’s family, the Arundells. “There are lots of personal touches,” he explains, “a myriad of objects similar to those we have at home.” Teakle wanted the shop to be intimate and low-key, to allow people to, he says, “discover” its magic as they move through the space — which explains why there are very few jewels displayed in the shop windows.
Teakle says the uncluttered, modern setting ensures that every jewel or jewelled object on offer has a “relevance to its contemporary existence.” Bringing the past into the present in such a dynamic way — with style and taste and an awareness of current fashions, all backed up by knowledge, expertise and academic research — is a special focus of Teakle’s, one that evolved from the serendipitous start to his working life, as a junior porter in the silver and jewelry department at Bonhams, the London auction house. Teakle, who was brought up in Lewes, Sussex, and educated at Eastbourne College, explains: “After a not particularly distinguished academic career, I thought I’d like to try working in an auction house. It was fortuitous that Bonhams put me in the jewelry department, rather than, say, furniture or Old Masters, because I became completely hooked.”
From there, he moved to Christie’s, where the well-respected and much-loved jewelry expert Albert Middlemiss was his mentor. Middlemiss taught him to appreciate every jewel that came through the department, whether grand and aristocratic or small and humble. This training explains the unusually broad but also carefully curated and intensely personal selection of jewels Teakle offers today. He chooses each piece himself, looking for those with style, personality, quirkiness and craftsmanship.
Non-jewelry items on offer include, from left on the top shelf: a weather station clock by Auricoste, ca. 1930; a George III silver warming dish, 1778; a desk clock by Cartier, ca. 1930. A pair of George II silver candlesticks by John Café, ca. 1740, and George III silver tureens by Solomon Hougham, ca. 1787, sit on the shelf below.
“My auction background means that I select pieces from right across the board,” Teakle explains, “from all periods and styles, and across all price ranges — from a pair of Van Cleef & Arpels earrings, for example, for perhaps half a million dollars, down to a nineteenth-century emerald-green Vauxhall glass cross pendant for, say, eight-hundred dollars.” He concludes:. “Beauty and rarity don’t have to cost a fortune.”
At any one time, you might find in the shop a string of early trade beads from Cameroon, an 18th-century paste pin, an elegant Regency agate necklace, a glamorous mid-20th-century gold-and-diamond bracelet by Boivin or a contemporary treasure by JAR, Daniel Brush or Taffin by James de Givenchy. Teakle also creates pieces of his own design from exceptional gems, and occasionally alters an antique jewel — re-mounting a 19th-century diamond bird pin on a bangle, for example, to preserve its integrity and make it that much more modern, wearable and dramatic.
Alongside the jewels, Teakle likes to keep a selection of quirky, unexpected objects ideal for gifting. “So many women want to buy something for their husbands — fun, not-too-expensive objects for the office or den that you can’t find anywhere else,” he says. For instance? How about a huge and heavy jumble of antique keys on a massive key ring, a 1940s aircraft panel or an Hermès clock dating from the 1930s?
Many of Teakle’s clients are scattered across the globe, but just as many are local, often young and from the world of finance. (Greenwich, known as Wall Street’s bedroom, has perhaps the highest concentration of hedge-fund managers in the world). They are, he says, well-informed and eager to learn, quick to develop taste and acquire expertise. And Teakle clearly takes great pleasure in sharing information and knowledge — his people skills match his jewelry expertise. “In this business, it’s all about relationships,” he says. Relationships and remarkable jewels, that is.
To read more about the event please visit: imagesanddetails.com
