A broken potato chip was never once served at Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon’s home. The late horticulturalist, art collector, landscape designer, and sometimes-recluse—best known for the White House Rose Garden reno she undertook for the Kennedys—had staff at her Virginia estate remove all but the most intact Lay’s before serving the charmingly lowbrow treat to guests.
More than a decade after she died at the age of 103, Mellon’s name is still invoked as a shorthand for midcentury elegance and exacting perfectionism. The New York native—born on Madison Avenue, no less—was the right-hand woman of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and a devoted patron of the late Tiffany & Co. designer Jean Schlumberger. By the end of her life, she had nearly 150 pieces adorned with his diamond and sapphire butterflies or gold and emerald flowers. (Staff at the estate claim they still find pieces tucked away around the house.)
Among her trove was one of the first Bird on the Rock brooches made by Tiffany & Co. in 1965—arguably Schlumberger’s most recognizable design. It’s no surprise, then, that as the jewelry house releases the latest iteration of the Bird on a Rock collection this month, it is returning to the proverbial well—Mellon’s Virginia estate—for inspiration. The sprawling property is the same one where Schlumberger regularly visited his friend—and where he, in turn, would seek inspiration among Mellon’s immaculate gardens and library of over 10,000 horticultural volumes.
“We studied birds as Jean Schlumberger did,” says Chief Artistic Officer Nathalie Verdeille of designing the latest collection, “carefully observing their stances, their feathers, the structures of their wings.” Tiffany evidently also studied Schlumberger himself. While the line’s fine jewelry pieces are arranged in a variety of subtle, diamond-encrusted wing patterns, the high jewelry items center two different gemstones: tanzanite and turquoise, with the latter chosen as a nod to Schlumberger’s love of the material. Settings unfurl around each like gold talons securing a catch in flight.
Today, the rise of “if you know, you know” fashion, archival runway pulls, and historic reinterpretations like Tiffany’s Bird on the Rock collection suggest that a sense of lineage and place is in high regard. Each time a design is plucked from the churn of history and made lustrous once again, the result is memorable—a piece with historic heft that transcends karats.
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