How does Monet's garden grow?

When my family and I vacationed in France last summer, one of the essential stops on the itinerary was Giverny. Our French tour guides were impressed, because Giverny is not your usual hotspot, crawling with tourists hungry for souvenirs. It’s a small, rural village off the beaten path, and if it’s swarmed by anything at all, it would more likely be butterflies, or art students. Or simple art lovers like us, who consider Giverny a Mecca of sorts because it’s where Claude Monet lived and painted.

As one of the fathers of Impressionism, Monet put Giverny on the map because his house and gardens — which are both fairly huge, as it turns out — served as the subjects for his most famous paintings. Though Monet was a undoubtedly a romantic — his gardens are filled with flowering arbors and benches from which to soak up their colors and fragrances — he was also drawn to the exotic Far East: Japan, in particular. His sunny-yellow dining room is wallpapered with the Japanese woodblock prints he collected, and behind his home he tried to recreate a Japanese garden, complete with stands of bamboo, weeping willows and a footbridge arching over a lily pond.

Monet’s water garden is so spectacular you could literally spend a day just watching the crystalline light play on the water, and apparently that is what the master did. He painted a whole series of canvases called “Nympheas (Water Lilies),” which are more about his garden’s reflections on the water than the actual flowers themselves.

Just as Monet was inspired by his garden, so, too, were the jewelry designers at H. Stern, whose current collection, Giverny, was brought to the Philippines by Adora. The Rio-based jewelry house has always taken its cue from nature; previous collections have been called Stars, Moonlight, Spring, Sunrise, and Zephyr. 

The Giverny collection is possibly H. Stern’s most organic-looking collection to date. The matching set of necklace, ring and earrings looks like Monet’s water-lily leaves, except spun in gold and diamonds. According to the literature, H. Stern’s understanding of Monet’s passions as a painter and study of his work as a gardener resulted in a jewelry collection of natural forms, interpreted with great attention to the texture and transparency of each piece. Layered elements in the rings and pendant, which look like large leaves overlaid on top of each other, are a reference to the flowerbeds of different heights Monet created to add volume and dimension to his garden. Additional Impressionist influences are expressed in the subtle variations in the color of the diamonds, recalling the change of light intensity and hue throughout the day.

The Giverny collection’s statement-makers are modern and bold yet have a certain delicacy — the intricacy of the metalwork reminds me of filigree — much like H. Stern’s other collections. In the Cobblestones collection, for example, which takes its inspiration from a charming street in a Brazilian resort town, even if the gems and crystals are large, their clarity lends the designs a certain lightness.

If you read fashion magazines, the name H. Stern probably sounds familiar. Their media presence and trade in bijoux are major in Hollywood: everyone from Halle Berry to Katy Perry has worn their designs to red-carpet events. The bauble house even adapted one of their ring designs for Fergie’s wedding to Josh Duhamel.

Young German Hans Stern (1922-2007) fell into the jewelry biz when he was but 23 and working in Brazil as a trading company typist. The story goes that he saw a mound of gemstones on a coworker’s desk, held them and it was instant love. He founded H. Stern Jewelers in 1945 and the 62-year-old company is now the largest jeweler in Brazil and Latin America and one of the largest and most recognizable jewelry brands in the world. 

Starting with a small gemstone trading office in downtown Rio de Janeiro, Hans expanded into jewelry manufacturing, opening a shop near the docks. By 1964 Time magazine had declared Stern “the king of colored stones.” If not for Stern, bling lovers wouldn’t have embraced dazzling aquamarine, tourmaline, amethyst and topaz with such zeal. Before Hans, it was only about diamonds and so-called oriental stones — rubies, sapphires, emeralds; with Hans pushing what ultimately became known as “Brazilian colored stones” (even if they weren’t actually sourced from Brazil, the world’s largest producer of such gems), the world started to think in rainbow hues.

By 1958, using lapidary technicians and goldsmiths from Europe, H. Stern was the first jewelry company in Latin America to establish its own gemological laboratory.

With the first H. Stern Trunk Show in 1975, the company invited clients to trade in their unwanted gold — a kind of gemological “cash for clunkers program” that brought new life to old gem settings.

By the ’80s, celebrities like Brooke Shields brought new cachet to the brand through fundraising fashion shows. But it was the launch of the Catherine Deneuve line, taking off from the unforgettable Luis Buñuel film Belle de Jour, which started the trend of celebrity-inspired jewelry collections. Since then, designer jewelry has become an indelible part of H. Stern’s DNA. The company’s latest collaboration is with fashion designer Diane Von Furstenberg, a passionate jewelry collector who based her 45-piece collection on five chapters of her life, career and personal style.

Today, Hans’ dynamic eldest son, Roberto Stern, runs the company as president and creative director. H. Stern jewelry is sold all over the world, from Moscow to Manila, and the company employs over 3,000 professionals, 600 of which are artisans.

Sixty years later, the house Hans built is still attuned to the ways that modern women like to wear jewelry. And, in the case of Giverny, adorning yourself with such fine ornaments this season is akin to wearing Monet’s art — virtually transporting you to his garden.

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Giverny and other collections by H. Stern are exclusively available at Adora Department Store, 2/F Greenbelt 5, Ayala Center, Makati City, tel. no. 217-4029.