When Olivier Reza can’t sleep at night, you won’t find him scrolling social media or binge-watching Netflix. “I’m checking stock. I just look, and look, and look,” says the jeweler, rattling off his go-to websites of esteemed art dealers and auction houses: Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Phillips, and the like. “I’m just this sucker waiting to see something that I’ve never seen before.” That’s increasingly difficult these days, given how deeply engrossed Reza, who grew up in Paris and now lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has become in the art world.
There’s very little this connoisseur, now 50, hasn’t seen before—a predicament that makes the thrill of discovery all the more intoxicating. A collector since his early 20s, Reza and his wife Yosun have filled their sprawling prewar apartment on Manhattan’s East 61st Street—a luxuriant abode that was formerly three units—with a vast range of artworks, including paintings and sculptures dating back to the Renaissance. A sizable painting from Fernand Léger’s “Women With a Bird” series occupies an entire wall in the main entryway, while a smaller but equally impressive piece by the abstractionist painter Thomas Nozkowski hangs nearby, its colorful, graphic lines in striking juxtaposition to the space’s deep gray palette. “It just gets better with time,” muses Reza.
A still more surprising sight, if only for its rarity, is a work by Pieter Brueghel the Younger titled Peasant Lawyer, of which the Flemish Renaissance artist is said to have made some 20 versions. Reza felt compelled to acquire the work for sentimental reasons: His father owned another version of it during his childhood. “I’d like to buy more masters,” he muses, “but I only have so many walls to fill.” Other museum-worthy works on view include a sculpture by the Greek-Italian contemporary artist Jannis Kounellis, which hangs in the library. Behind it, stacks of artists’ monographs fill the bookshelves—a revealing glimpse of Reza’s far-ranging tastes.
Between his home city’s historic architecture, its renowned museums, and the designs and craftsmanship on perpetual display at his father Alexandre’s namesake jewelry maison, one might assume that Reza’s passion for art was instilled at an early age. It wasn’t until Reza was in his late teens, however, that he experienced an aesthetic awakening. “Suddenly, everything started to make an impression on me: furniture, paintings. I became extremely sensitive to everything surrounding me,” he recalls.
When the elder Reza passed away in 2016, Women’s Wear Daily commemorated his reputation as the “greatest gem merchant and collector of his generation,” an illustrious dealer who spent his early career acquiring gemstones for houses like Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari, Cartier, and Harry Winston before launching his own in the mid-’50s.The elder Reza was a collector before he was a designer and maker—both in his trade and his home. “He just loved beautiful things,” Reza remembers. “He was very into 18th-century furniture, and he loved bronzes.”
Reza’s own aesthetic preferences skew modernist, especially when it comes to furniture design. “I was always more interested in the functional arts,” he says. Modernism sparked a personal “revelation,” especially the work of artists and designers from the Art Deco era: Jean-Michel Frank, Paul Dupré-Lafon, and Koloman Moser, along with several others he praised for their pioneering aesthetics.
By 2020, Reza had taken over his father’s fine jewelry maison and moved operations from Paris to New York. The younger, more irreverent metropolis was a fitting place for Reza to reinvigorate the venerable brand, reframing its ethos to reflect his own diverse and eclectic tastes—and in the process, attract a new generation of jewelry collectors. Today, the maison’s extensive oeuvre is inspired by concepts as sweeping as the wilds of nature, and as granular as the frills of a Victorian collar. “The collector makes the art as much as the artist. I look at it the same way with my jewelry,” Reza says, noting that details from the works in his collection have informed his designs.
The resulting pieces are, in spirit and sensibility, an extension of Reza’s art-collecting proclivities: fresh, surprising, and delighting in contrast. “The eclecticism is the whole point,” he reasons. “I’m constantly looking for the next thing that’s going to rock my boat.”
Set design by Bittany Albert
