A Pirate’s Life for Thee

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For many, our earliest childhood memories of covetable gems, precious metals, and bejeweled pieces aren’t from the collections of loved ones, but from the world of storytelling. No one captured this desirability and its adventurous undertones quite like Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of 1883’s Treasure Island, known as a tale of buccaneers and buried gold. For their most recent high jewelry collection, L’Île au Trésor, Van Cleef & Arpels looked to this story—its fantastical nature and unbridled excitement—for inspiration.

For a luxury house known for treasures of true grandeur, not only was the source material fitting, it was an invitation to marry their imagination with their technical capabilities. More than 100 pieces were designed and meticulously crafted by the maison’s artisans. From schooner-inspired clips to a hammered white gold mystery box with a scene of fish set atop a sealike mosaic of paillonné enamel, attributes from the oceanic voyage, the story’s characters, and swashbuckling plot points translate into the design of the pieces.

Extraordinary gemstones in the collection, worthy of tales of treasure, include a 47.93-carat emerald cabochon at heart of the Palmeraie Merveilleuse necklace; a cushion-cut violet sapphire, weighing 12.69 carats, set into the Ornement d’Alexandrina ring; and an oval spessartite garnet weighing 23.47 carats shimmering from the Moussaillon necklace.

In September 2024, Catherine Rénier became the CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels—bringing more than two decades of experience in the luxury timepiece and jewelry sector to the maison. For the executive, it was a return voyage of sorts, since she had worked with the house from 2003 until she was appointed CEO of Jaeger-LeCoultre in 2018. As such, Rénier is acutely familiar with the heritage of Van Cleef & Arpels, as well as the techniques that separate their artisans from those at other houses. She’s also committed to storytelling at the highest level.

David Graver: What brought you back to Van Cleef & Arpels?

Catherine Rénier: The maison has a lot of inspiration to give. You see this in the Treasure Island collection. It’s a maison that continuously reinvents itself on the basis of its heritage and craftsmanship, and it always takes the story a step further. What I found in this maison is a sense of creativity like nowhere else. I love the freedom of expression that we have, but it’s still always very true to itself. For me, it’s also clearly a place of history anchored in craftsmanship. Our workshops, our expertise in stones, our mystery setting, they’ve always been very inspiring to me.  I started my career with Van Cleef & Arpels, close to the high jewelry workshops where I was based in Paris. I think that left a memory that touched me personally. This proximity to the actual craft, the hands, the spirit, and the act of creating one extraordinary piece. I see this expertise in crafting gold, the setting of stones. It fascinated me more than 20 years ago. It felt very natural to come back.

Storytelling is integral to this high jewelry collection, but also overall to Van Cleef & Arpels, correct?

High jewelry collections at Van Cleef & Arpels have taken their inspiration from many different artistic dimensions. This year it’s literature, with Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In the past, we’ve been inspired by other novels, but also by the stories of the stones themselves. We did a collection about extraordinary diamonds in 2022. We’ve done collections about rubies. We’ve also done collections about places, or locations, like Le Grand Tour in Italy last year. When it comes to literature as inspiration, the storytelling aspect is easy to understand because we take the artist’s work and bring the essence of their tale into our interpretation as a high jewelry collection. 

Why Treasure Island?

We wanted to convey that sense of adventure you find in the book. We wanted to underscore the importance of the treasure itself, but we also wanted the journey on the ocean and the adventure on the island to be part of the collection. So we organized the collection into what we refer to as three chapters. 

This book in particular is known for fostering a nostalgic, emotional connection. 

We knew that this book was reminiscent of childhood memories for so many people across the globe. Quite interestingly, it’s very culturally transversal. This book has placed images of pirates in the minds of a lot of children, as well as the sense of adventure, the quest for treasure, and the concept of treasure maps, too. We really wanted all of this to be reflected in the collection.  In some aspects, we’ve been literal. When we craft these little figurines, they’re directly inspired by characters in the book, or when we did the Hispaniola clip, it’s a tribute to the boat that they embarked upon. But we’ve also celebrated the story in playful and colorful ways. We didn’t take it too seriously. We let our imagination go and approached it almost as a child would, imagining what it would be like to land on an island and see turtles or play with seashells. We let our own inspiration run with the playfulness that we found in Stevenson’s story.

You’ve tapped into that childhood wonder and made it something that people can connect to as adults, through these treasures. Can you talk about the importance of the division of the collection into sea, island, and treasure hunt?

We kept the flow of the story, but we didn’t address each chapter in Stevenson’s novel. We summarized it all into these three themes, which really gave us the essence of the journey. The journey on the sea is the first chapter of the collection and, for us, what it brings is all that ocean and maritime inspiration.

How does that translate visually?

In this chapter of the high jewelry collection, you see a lot of pieces inspired by nautical ropes, or other elements of the boat. There are elements of ocean inspiration, the waves, the blue color of the sea. This is very familiar territory for the maison. We have had maritime inspiration in our high jewelry pieces for decades. We even did a collection in 2008 about the Atlantic. We’re fully dedicated to the maritime world.

And then, through the collection, we land on the island.

Here it’s the flora and fauna that are expressions of Van Cleef & Arpels, but in a very tropical way. It’s less birds and butterflies, more turtles and seashells. That’s how we reinterpreted what we would imagine the island, or a deserted island in the tropics, itself could be. The last chapter is about the treasure itself. The whole point of the story is about the quest for treasure, so we had to celebrate this with an abundance of pieces. We wanted the creations to be vibrant. We wanted them to be very colorful. 

 e also really wanted them to be inspired by global journeys that these pirates could have taken. You have clips from Colombia, pre-Columbian inspiration, as well as inspiration from India and Asia. You can imagine that these pirates would travel the seas of the world and collect treasures, bring them back to this deserted island and put them in a treasure chest. The story, for us, was a very blank page regarding what the treasure could look like. For all three chapters, we paid careful attention to what these creations bring to life, all of which represents the craftsmanship of the maison.

It’s Treasure Island the Van Cleef & Arpels way!

We respect the chapters, and we respect the environment. We introduce our view of the story, and then we will bring our Mystery setting. You have some in each of the chapters. We use extraordinary stones, selected specifically for the collection, and we also pay tribute to some of our specific capabilities. In the first chapter, you see a lot of designs inspired by ropes made of twisted gold. This is a technique that we were using quite a lot in the 1950s and 60s. We brought it back. You see the wealth of inspiration and how through our stones and craftsmanship and storytelling, it all comes together like a puzzle and gives birth to the collection itself.

How does this collection represent the maison’s commitment to exquisite stones?

The way we use them is always twofold. There are stones that we will specifically look for—to fit a piece we feel that we need, like a set of rubies. Then there are stones that we encounter by chance, like the turquoise we used in the Noeuds Marins necklace, for instance, which is also set with a beautiful emerald. These colors, the blue of the turquoise and the green of the Colombian emerald, are the perfect color combination for this collection. They represent the blue of the water and the green of the island. For this, when we saw those stones, we decided to put them together. It’s quite daring because at first they may not seem like they were made to be together. The creativity of the maison gives so much purpose to the pieces. When we select our stones, we always pay attention to the ones that we feel have character to them. This is especially when we are working with colored stones. The standards are less defined than in the world of diamonds, which has the four Cs.

In what way do you evaluate stones of this caliber?

We take into consideration the origin. It’s also going to be about the cut and the color itself. We ask, “How do we feel this fits within our portfolio?” We also consider combinations, like those in this collection—whether an extraordinary stone can exist as a single piece or be associated with another. There are pear-shaped sapphires that look like they were made for one another; they couple together in one necklace. In many ways, it’s a quest for the stones. And it’s also the boldness to make certain color combinations. This gives the maison its wealth of expression and uniqueness.

Once you’ve departed Treasure Island, where to next?

Of course I hope for success, but success is so many things. It’s to maintain desirability and keep the public interested in what we do. This is triggered by creativity, and it comes through the products themselves, our creations. We are a jeweler, so we must make beautiful pieces that are inspiring, that are daring, that are of high quality, that respect our heritage, and of course that are relevant to the public today. This is the base.

 hen, obviously, for a maison like ours, it’s about the client experience when they come to our boutiques, when coming to our events, or when they’re discovering our collection. It’s about educating them and bringing them into our world. We pay a lot of attention to this in the way we do our collection reveals in our boutiques, where we want this homey, warm feeling when you walk in. 

 e also pay a lot of attention to educating the public at large, not just our clients, because jewelry is a complex world, one that was very secretive for a very long time. These workshops in Paris, nobody can push the door open. We created L’École, School of Jewelry Arts, which is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels. The role of this school is to open the doors of the world of jewelry to the public. It’s not for clients, but for everyone to enter the world of jewelry and to hear stories of our artisans, become educated on stones and the history of the craft. This is really important for the maison and has been for the last few years, and will continue to be the foundation of how we do what we do for the future.

The house is already on top of its game, but is there anything you wish people would pay closer attention to?

Well, you know what I think is most important is that we continue to surprise. I feel it’s our role to continue to bring excitement to how we do things. And again, Treasure Island is a good example. We commissioned David B., the French comic book artist and illustrator, to make drawings inspired by the book and its story. And with these drawings, and our high jewelry pieces, we’re able to present our wonders and make clear that there’s a depth to these objects beyond just the beautiful stones, beyond the craftsmanship. They tell a story, can be playful and colorful, yet also extremely delicate and complex. I feel it’s important for us to continue to inspire the public, and give them this spark of interest. And at Van Cleef & Arpels, I hope it will always be this way.