Journal — by Stillora.ej
I never set out to start a brand. I just kept finding things I couldn't walk past.
A small ring at a flea in Paris, the silver soft from a hundred years of being turned on someone's finger. A pendant at an estate sale in upstate America, still in the velvet box it had been bought in, the receipt tucked inside — for our anniversary, 1962. But also: a quiet contemporary necklace from an independent designer's workshop, hand-formed in a way that made me stop in front of the window. A pair of newly-made earrings carved from labradorite by someone working alone in a small studio.
I would bring them home. I would clean the old ones gently. I would set everything out on the table and look at it for a long time.
That's how Stillora started.
What Stillora is, and is not
Stillora is not a vintage store. And it is not a contemporary jewellery brand either. It is something simpler, and harder to name:
A small place for things I think are beautiful.
Some of those things are decades or centuries old. Some of them were made last month. The age doesn't matter to me. The standard does.
If a piece moves me — the way it sits in light, the way it has been made, the silence around it when I hold it — I bring it in. If it doesn't, I don't, no matter how rare it is or who made it.
That's the whole brief.
Where I look — for the old
I don't have a method. I have a list of cities, and a habit of arriving early.
In Paris, I walk the vide-greniers — neighbourhood flea markets that pop up on a single weekend, where a family clears out a grandmother's apartment onto a folding table on the sidewalk. The best pieces come from the people who don't know what they have. You learn to look slowly. You learn to crouch.
In London, I love the small markets and the back-room auctions. The pieces I have brought home from there are quiet — Edwardian, Victorian, sometimes earlier. A signed English silver brooch in a tray of mixed metal nobody else had touched. A sapphire ring nobody had bid on because the photo was bad.
In Italy, I walk markets that have been markets for a thousand years. Florence on a Tuesday morning. Arezzo on the first weekend of the month. Lucca's antique fair when the season turns. The dealers there know things about garnets and corals that nobody under sixty knows anywhere else.
In Spain, I have stood in dim courtyards where the light comes down between buildings the colour of saffron, holding silver that has lived through centuries of someone else's prayers.
And in America — this is where I love most, and where I find the most. The flea markets. The antique shops in small towns I'd never heard of until I went. Sunday mornings in tiny towns in the Hudson Valley, parking-lot fairs in California, an estate sale in a 1920s house where the family is selling everything that won't fit in the moving truck. I have brought home Avon in its original boxes from the seventies, Sarah Coventry sets still pinned to their satin cards, Oscar de la Renta earrings folded in tissue, signed costume pieces from English makers nobody outside of England has heard of. I have bought a brass pendant from a woman in a barn who said, take it, I want it to belong to someone who'll love it.
eBay, sometimes. The right listing, late at night, from someone who clearly inherited a box and just wants it gone. I bid quietly.
Where I look — for the new
Modern pieces find me a different way. They come from independent makers — small studios, sometimes a single person at a bench. I follow their work for a long time before I reach out. I want to know how a designer thinks before I sell what they make.
I look for contemporary pieces that have the same quality the old ones have: a feeling that the maker meant it. A weight that's right. A finish that's been left thoughtfully imperfect. A stone chosen for its character rather than its grade.
I'm not interested in trend pieces or mass-produced "delicate" jewellery. I'm interested in the tiny percentage of new work that, fifty years from now, will still feel like it was worth keeping.
What I look for, in everything
Not the most precious. Not the most pristine. Not the most famous label.
I look for the maker's hand, whether the maker died a century ago or finished the piece on Tuesday. The setting cut with confidence. The clasp built to last. The single stone chosen with patience.
I look at the back of things. The hallmarks. The seams. The little tells.
I love finding old pieces with their original boxes — a velvet-lined Avon case still smelling faintly of its original perfume, a Sarah Coventry card with the price tag from 1972 still on the corner. The box is half the find.
I look for stones that haven't been improved — unheated rubies, untreated sapphires, lapis still flecked with its original pyrite. I look for pearls that aren't perfectly round.
And in everything, old or new, I look for the moment when a piece feels finished — when nothing in it is fighting for attention, when it just is what it is, quietly, completely.
You need eyes for this
This work, mostly, is about looking.
A flea market table is chaos — hundreds of small things in a tin tray, tangled, dusty, half-hidden under cheap costume from the nineties. Most people walk past. The pieces I bring home are almost always the ones somebody else didn't see. A gold chain coiled in a corner. A signed Coventry brooch face-down beside a broken watch. A ring with a real stone in a pile that the seller has priced as glass.
A designer's lookbook is the same kind of chaos, in a different language. Twenty pieces on a page, and one of them — sometimes — is the one.
You don't develop the eye quickly. You develop it by looking, year after year, until the small things start to step forward and ask to be seen.
I am still learning. Every market, every studio, every Sunday morning teaches me something new.
What happens after
I bring everything home in a small zipped pouch. I lay each piece out on a white cloth and photograph it in the same morning light. I weigh it, measure it, write down what I know about where it came from — the city, the table, sometimes the seller's name. For new pieces, the maker, the studio, the year.
Then I clean the old ones with the lightest hand I can. I almost never polish. I never re-set. I never re-plate. If a stone is loose, I have it tightened by a jeweller in town who is older than I am and trusts me. The patina stays. The dent stays. The little scratch stays.
If a vintage piece arrives in its original box, the box comes with it. Always.
For new pieces, I tell you who made them, and how, and why I chose them.
Why I do this
Because beautiful things are rare, and I think they should find their people.
It doesn't matter to me whether a piece is a hundred years old or six weeks old. If it is made well, and made with care, and quiet enough to live with for a long time — it belongs here.
A vintage Avon brooch that someone's grandmother loved. A new ring from a designer working alone in a small Lisbon studio. The same morning light on both. The same care in how I send them out.
I am only the bridge.
— Stillora.ej