THE CURATED LIFE
LONDON’S GRAFTON Street does not end where, on first glance, it appears to; instead, it doglegs for two short blocks. And there, on the second of the two blocks and just a few yards away from the luxury retail world of New and Old Bond Streets, is a remarkable little shop entirely unlike the nearby flagship stores of big international brands that vie to outdo one another in splendor and size. Wartski of Llandudno, an art and antiques dealer, is not so much a shop as a place of aesthetic enrichment. “The thing about some of these objects is that they’re like one’s friends,” says Geoffrey Munn, managing director of Wartski, who can be disarmingly candid about the objects arranged in the vitrines around him. “They’re completely charming and sometimes utterly useless.”
Conversations at Wartski are not about whether the latest handbag is in stock, but more about how Dürer, da Vinci and Holbein trained as goldsmiths or how the Tudor miniature painter Nicholas Hilliard had his own hallmark. Rather than requesting a preview of the pre-fall collection, a Wartski customer is more likely to ask to see the work of a jeweler who went out of business generations ago—perhaps the Parisian Paul Robin, whose classically inspired jewelry was le dernier cri in 19th-century Paris, or Carlo Giuliano, whose neo-Renaissance jewelry shop on Piccadilly enjoyed success during the time of the Pre-Raphaelites. The most modern thing you are likely to find in Wartski is a splendid 1940s brooch from Cartier or a ring by that master of American deco, Paul Flato.