Fine Coloured Gems · Private Sourcing
A private collection of fine coloured stones, sourced in person and through trusted hands, selected for uncommon colour, clarity and life.
PRIVATE SOURCING
The stones offered here come from two places. Some are owned outright, bought in person. Others are held by people I have worked with for some time — miners, village dealers, cutters and a few regular hands in the markets — and can be acquired on request. That network is the point of the business. It has been built by going, repeatedly, to where the stones come out of the ground and to where they are first cut, and by looking at a great many parcels for the rare one worth taking. Colour and rarity decide it. Every stone, whichever way it arrives, is examined by hand and in daylight before it is shown. What appears here is a selection, not the extent of what can be found. If you are looking for something particular, ask.
A note from Alex
The best stones are found, not offered. I am not a large house. I travel, I look at a great many stones and buy very few, and I would rather tell you honestly what a stone is than sell it to you. I go where the colour is, and some of those places are not easy to reach — that is part of what I enjoy about it, and part of why the stones are worth having. If you write, the reply will come from me. If you would like to see something in person, that can be arranged.
Look first — what it took to find each one follows.
AV / 031
Nearly three carats of copper-bearing Paraíba tourmaline — the copper that gives Paraíba its colour, and the reason it ranks among the most prized gems in the world. A soft bluish green, transparent, cut as an oval with a brilliant crown. Richly included, as Paraíba so often is, and the inclusions work for it: they catch the light and throw flashes across the stone as it moves — best seen in the video. Heated, as is customary for Paraíba; the colour is stable and permanent. 10.55 × 8.24 × 4.51 mm.
Price on application
Mozambique · Heated
n 1796 a twenty‑six‑year‑old general with a new command and almost no money bought a ring for the woman he intended to marry. It was a small thing — a pear‑shaped sapphire beside a pear‑shaped diamond, each under a carat, set so the two stones face each other. The setting was called toi et moi. The general was Napoleon Bonaparte and the woman was Josephine. Eight years later, in Notre‑Dame, he took the crown from the altar and placed it on his own head, then turned and crowned her Empress himself. The ring came first, and she kept it. In 2013 it came up at auction at Fontainebleau with an estimate of fifteen thousand euros and sold for almost a million. The stones had not changed. What people were paying for was the fact that before there was a crown, there was this — and that a man who could later afford anything had thought it enough.
AV / 030
A 4.24 ct spessartite in the vivid orange the trade calls mandarin — the most sought-after colour in spessartite, and the hardest to find. Clean stones are scarce in this material, and the larger they get the rarer they become — this one is eye clean face up at over four carats. Garnet's high refractive index gives it a brilliance few orange stones can match, and the cushion cut — a brilliant crown over a step-cut pavilion — keeps the colour alive from every angle. Not heated. 9.14 × 8.31 × 6.05 mm.
Price on application
Namibia · No indication of heating
n the hills of southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, tsavorite garnet forms under exactly the pressure that later tries to destroy it — the same tectonic violence that gives the stone its green also shatters most crystals into fragments too small to ever be cut, which is why a clean stone over a carat is genuinely hard to find. Reaching what survives can mean shafts sunk eighty metres or more through solid rock, dug by hand over months, with miners crawling the final stretch on hands and knees through gaps barely wide enough for a body. Many are also farmers, mining between harvests to see out a bad season. Some shafts produce nothing for months at a time.
AV / 029
Past two carats, tsavorite becomes genuinely rare. This one is 2.37. A deep, saturated green from Tanzania that breaks into bright flashes the moment it moves — tsavorite bends light more sharply than emerald, and it shows. Untreated: the colour is exactly as it came from the ground. Cut as a cushion, a brilliant crown over a step-cut pavilion, 7.63 × 6.91 × 5.66 mm. A small natural inclusion sits beneath the table, shown honestly in the detail photograph.
Price on application
Tanzania · No indication of heating
n the valley of Mogok, in the hills of upper Burma, rubies and spinels have been dug from the same gravel for at least five hundred years. The gravel is called byon. It lies beneath metres of red earth and has to be reached by hand — open pits in the wet season, narrow shafts in the dry, timbered, flooded, bailed and worked by candle and torch. Whole villages live on what comes up. Behind the pits, by long custom, the women called kanase are allowed to pick through what the miners have already thrown away, and some of the valley's finest stones have been found that way, on the second look. Ruby is the stone the world knows from here. Spinel is the one the valley keeps closer. It comes out of the byon as perfect eight-sided crystals with faces so clean they need no cutting at all, and the miners have a name for them — nat thwe, polished by the spirits. A stone that leaves the ground already finished is the rarest thing a pit can give. The valley has been giving them, a few at a time, for as long as anyone has been digging.