A grading bench that turned into a shop.
Isle & Orient grades, matches and strings everything it sells, in one room in Tribeca, and has done since 2014. There is no factory behind us and no second location.
The bench, mid-afternoon. Grading happens at the north window.
Six years of sorting other people's pearls.
Elin Ferreira spent six years grading pearls for a wholesaler before starting this. The job was to sort incoming harvests into quality bands so a sales team could price them, and the thing that became impossible to ignore was how little of that information survived the journey to the customer. Everything she measured — nacre, matching, the actual lustre grade — collapsed into a marketing letter somewhere between the bench and the display case.
So the house was built the other way round. The grading report is the product; the pearl is what the report is about. It sounds like a distinction that would matter only to a gemologist. In practice it is the difference between spending nine thousand dollars on something you can evaluate and spending it on something you have been asked to trust.
We are four people. We buy from three farms, once a year each. We string on silk by hand because there is no machine that does it properly, and because a knotted strand that breaks loses one pearl instead of all of them. Everything else — the appointments, the restringing, the commissions — grew out of people asking.
A bench, a window, forty spools of silk.
The atelier is a bench, a north-facing window, a set of gauges, a loupe, and about forty spools of silk in graded thicknesses. Grading happens at the window because daylight is the only light that tells the truth about overtone. Appointments happen at the same bench, with the same loupe, and you are welcome to use it.
Four things we hold to
The numbers go on the page
Every grading factor, published before purchase, on every piece. If it is not on the page, ask, and we will measure it.
No treatments we do not name
Nothing we sell is bleached, dyed, irradiated or coated. Where a pearl has been lightly polished — normal, and harmless — the report says so.
We buy whole lots or nothing
Cherry-picking a harvest is how a strand ends up assembled from four sources with four colours. We take the lot and do the sorting ourselves.
Restringing is free, forever
Silk stretches and holds dirt. Anything bought here comes back to the bench for restringing at no cost, for as long as you own it.
The kettle is usually on and nobody works on commission.
Appointments are free, take about an hour, and carry no expectation that you buy anything. Bring your own pearls if you have them and we will grade them while you wait.