Bayco

Bayco is the New York fine-jewelry house the Hadjibay family founded in the 1980s, known for holding one of the largest collections of unheated rubies and sapphires of any jewelry house — including Kashmir sapphires, among the most coveted blue stones in the world. Nearly all corundum on the market is heated to force its color; Bayco works in stones that have never seen heat, whose color is the one nature gave them.

The house pairs that depth in unheated corundum with an extensive collection of emeralds drawn from the finest mines — the Colombian sources, Muzo and Chivor among them — chosen for the quality of the green. At Bayco the stone comes first; the gold and the design follow it, and the settings stay restrained, built to give a great stone the room to be the entire point of the piece.

I was twenty and already exhibiting at the gem show when I first stopped at Morris Hadjibay’s booth. I knew the trade — and what I saw in Bayco was an eye for the nuances of a stone that very few in the business have. I have watched the house ever since, and today I can draw on it freely — the natural return on a relationship that started at twenty.