Entering FoundRae, you might be forgiven for thinking you were stepping inside an antiquarian bookshop. Housed in an ornate Victorian building on Mount Street, next to the pastel-coloured Milanese pâtisserie Marchesi and a few doors down from Sautter Cigars, the jewellery store bears all the hallmarks of a library reading room – deep cherry-red walls, illuminated display cabinets filled with ephemera and rows of oak shelves lined with rare, cloth-bound encyclopaedias and books by writers such as Kipling and Dumas.
“I had just visited Sir John Soane’s museum at the time I was thinking of the space, and I was blown away by the depth of collecting and the maximalism,” says Ohio-born FoundRae founder Beth Hutchens, her fingers, wrists and neck adorned with stacks of jangling charms. “I felt a little unleashed, in a way. It gave me permission to not hold back.”
The shop’s exterior on Mount Street © Ben Broomfield. Courtesy of FoundRae
The London store, which opened this month, is the first international boutique (or “doorway”) for the New York-based fine jeweller, whose chunky gold medallions (from £1,110) and cigar band rings (£2,930) have found fans in Taylor Swift, Julianne Moore and Emily Blunt. A lexicon of mythological emblems is the starting point for all of Hutchens’ designs, whose diamond-studded motifs – sparrows, tigers and wheat sheaves among them – correlate to one of 10 “tenets”, such as infinite gratitude, strength and wholeness; a daily reminder of our own agency.
