Maison Orvelle · Place Vendôme · Est. 1897
Cut for the
Cut for the
light you live in.
A stone is not one jewel. It is a different jewel at every hour of the day. For a hundred and twenty-eight years we have cut each Orvelle stone twice — once for the stone, and once for the room it will be worn in.
Move your cursor to turn the stone. Change the light below.
The Maison
One stone
One stone
at a time,
since 1897.
Théodore Orvelle was a lamp-maker before he was a lapidary, and he never entirely stopped being one. He noticed what the trade had agreed to ignore: that the stones he sold by day under the tall north windows of the rue de la Paix were not the stones his clients wore at night.
So he built a room with no windows and five lamps in it, and he cut to the lamp rather than to the book. A stone destined for the opera was cut shallow, to catch a low warm gas-flame. A stone for a woman who rode in the mornings was cut deep. The house has worked this way ever since. We still ask, before anything else, one question that no other maison asks: where will you be wearing it?
Every piece below is cut for a particular light. The console at the foot of this page is that room with five lamps. Use it.
128Years on the Place Vendôme
4Master cutters, at any one time
1Stone on the wheel, ever
The Collections
Three lights,
Three lights,
three stones.
Each piece names the light it was cut for. Set the room to it and watch what the same stone does — the fire, the metal and the shadow all change hands.
Meridian
Cut to the book, for the street at midday. The only stone in the house that behaves.Sereine
Cut steep and cold, for a terrace in September. Wear them where there is no lamp.
The Cut
Fifty-eight facets,
Fifty-eight facets,
one argument.
The diagram beside this is not a drawing. It is a ray trace: three beams of your light entering the table of a brilliant, refracting at the boundary, bouncing off the pavilion by total internal reflection, and leaving through the crown. The three colours split because diamond bends red less than blue. That split is what the trade calls fire, and it is the entire reason to own one.
- 01It entersLight crosses the table and slows, bending toward the vertical.
- 02It is trappedPast 24.4° nothing escapes downward. The pavilion becomes a pair of mirrors.
- 03It leaves as fireExiting through the crown, each wavelength takes a slightly different door.
The AtelierFour rooms,
Four rooms,
eleven months.
Nothing leaves the second floor of number 14 until all four masters have signed the card that travels with the stone.
01 — Selection
Rough is bought uncut and unpapered, twice a year, by one person. We turn down more than we take.
02 — Study
Six weeks with the stone and no wheel. The inclusions decide the cut; we only agree with them.
03 — Cutting
To the lamp, not to the table of proportions. A stone for candlelight leaves the wheel two degrees shallow.
04 — Setting
Metal is chosen last, once the stone has been seen under all five lamps and has told us what it wants.
Appointment
A private
A private
viewing.
The salon is shown by appointment only, one party at a time. Tell us the light you expect to live in and we will have the tray made up before you arrive.
14 Place Vendôme, 75001 Paris
+33 1 42 00 18 97