Eugene Keshett, a self-made man with an extraordinary eye.
The origins of Maison Keshett lie with its founder, Eugene. A self-made man of singular instinct, who built one of Australia's most distinguished jewellery houses from the ground up, guided by nothing more than an extraordinary eye and an absolute refusal to settle for the ordinary.
Eugene Keshett arrived in Melbourne in September 1974, trained as a fashion designer in Europe, with a deep understanding of form, proportion and the discipline of craft.
Australia was in recession when he arrived. The factory where he found work had no position for a designer, so he became a cutter instead. On weekends, Eugene made his way to the treasure markets, selecting garments and objects to sell, guided by nothing but instinct.
He would choose the piece that had something the others beside it simply did not. People noticed and returned to buy from him. Within a year, Eugene secured himself a permanent spot at Victoria Market and committed to this full-time. It was here that his eye, long in the making, first found its true purpose. Paula worked alongside him from the very beginning.
Through a friend whose family were diamond merchants in Europe, Eugene entered the world of gemstones. Self-taught, as he had always been, he mastered gemology with the same rigour he brought to everything he chose to learn, wholesaling diamonds internationally and travelling to Thailand to deepen his knowledge of stones and the trade.
Eugene’s instinct for design soon pointed him toward creation and he began producing jewellery pieces for Melbourne jewellers. Then curiosity changed everything. Victorian and Edwardian jewellery were experiencing a profound resurgence and a trusted friend offered counsel that would alter the course of his life entirely. Go to England, he said. Eugene went, and never truly stopped going. For years Eugene divided his life between Melbourne and London, moving through auction rooms, private dealers and estate sales with the quiet authority of a man who knew precisely what he was looking at. But England was only the beginning. Eugene understood something that few in his trade had yet recognised: that the great wave of post-war immigration to South America, particularly to Argentina and Brazil, had created one of the most extraordinary concentrations of European jewellery outside of Europe itself.
Families who had fled in the decades following the Second World War had carried their wealth the only way they could, in gold, in silver, in the finest jewels of the old world. Argentina, once the wealthiest nation on earth, had become a profound repository of European craftsmanship and culture. Art Deco, so deeply embedded in the architecture and sensibility of that era, flourished there with a particular intensity. Eugene went to find it. He found more than he had imagined.
In 1979, Eugene relinquished his stall at the market and opened a small shop on Little Collins Street, within the heritage walls of Melbourne Chambers at the heart of the city's jewellery precinct.
Antique and vintage jewels retrieved from the great houses of Europe and the private collections of South America. Art Deco pieces of irreplaceable beauty. Diamonds from the finest merchants in Europe. Original designs bearing the Keshett sensibility. All were niw housed under one roof, at one address, with a standard that was entirely and unapologetically his own.
Over the decade that followed, Eugene absorbed two neighbouring spaces and created one considered maison from three. Paula joined him on his travels, her gift for understanding people sharpening alongside his gift for finding rare and treasured pieces.
Together Eugene & Paula built an archive, assembled over nearly five decades, governed by a covenant with the rare and the irreplaceable that has never once been compromised. Eugene Keshett entered every world as an outsider. He left each one having mastered it completely. That is the foundation upon which everything at Keshett is built, and the standard by which it continues to be measured.
That is the standard Keshett has kept ever since.
