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Add Texture to GoogleIn the fall of 2022, a glass panel shattered during the setup of a pop-up store in SoHo. The incident was routine, and the repair was urgent. Jeweler Bernard James—a New York-based fine jewelry house founded in Brooklyn—rushed to the showroom of Swiss manufacturer USM to find a replacement part. He left with his panel and a conversation underway. Four years later, that conversation has yielded a collection of home furnishings, a jeweler’s workbench made of steel tubes, and a monumental safe on display at the Swiss brand’s flagship store in New York. This is not an isolated case: from London to Los Angeles, several jewelry designers have expanded their scope to include tables, lamps, and vases.
The Haller system scaled down to the size of a piece of jewelry
USM is known more for a furniture concept than for any single piece of furniture. Its Haller tubular system assembles chrome-plated tubes and lacquered steel panels using spherical joints, allowing users to assemble, disassemble, and reassemble desks, storage units, and shelves. There is something about the precision of this industrial design language that resonates with jewelers, who are accustomed to working with assembly and tolerances down to a tenth of a millimeter.
The capsule collection born from this collaboration is titled “The Process of Living—Goods for the Home.” Unveiled in late 2023, it has been available since March 2024 and is limited to three categories of objects. The selection is deliberately limited: it reflects the daily routines of someone who wears jewelry—namely, putting it away, setting it down at night, and burning a stick of incense in the room where they sleep.
The modular jewelry box, available in three sizes, features the USM structure in lacquered steel, in classic black or in an olive green reserved for a limited edition. Its three drawers are lined with kid suede treated to prevent tarnishing—a detail specifically designed for silver and metals prone to oxidation. It closes with the quarter-turn lock characteristic of USM furniture, so that a home jewelry box borrows its lock from an office cabinet.
The trinket tray, also available in three sizes, features a USM chrome-plated steel frame covered in genuine leather—handcrafted in New York—and rests on shock-absorbing feet. The incense holder is the most recognizable piece in the collection: a gray smoked-glass base collects the ash, and it is the Haller system’s spherical metal ball joint—its signature connecting piece—that holds the incense stick in place. The most technical element of the modular furniture system becomes, in this case, a holder for a stick just a few millimeters thick.
The cost of a Swiss piece of furniture crafted in a jeweler’s workshop
The items are made to order, with an estimated lead time of four to six weeks. Prices listed on the online store in November 2026 show the incense holder at $590, or about 545 euros; the Small leather trinket box at $650 (about 600 euros); and the Medium at $790 (about 730 euros). The jewelry boxes, available in three sizes, top out at $5,500, or around 5,080 euros. These conversions are approximate: they are based on an exchange rate of approximately 0.92 euros to the dollar as of that date and do not take into account exchange rate fluctuations or import taxes, which vary by country.
There is not quite a consensus on the price range. At launch, the range spanned from $590 to $5,500. A much lower entry-level price of $175 (about 160 euros) was later reported, though it’s unclear which item that price corresponds to. No item at that price appears on the official store, where the incense holder remains the most affordable item. This $175 price point should therefore be taken with a grain of salt until a corresponding product is publicly listed.
The workbench installed in the showroom
The collaboration took on a new dimension with “In Process,” a residency held from September 12 to November 7, 2026, at USM’s flagship showroom in Manhattan, located at 28–30 Greene Street. The location is in SoHo, the neighborhood where the glass panel had shattered four years earlier.
The centerpiece of this residency is a workbench. Named “Makers’ Desk,” it was designed by Bernard James using the Haller system and functions as a true jeweler’s workstation. Its modular structure features a gradient ranging from gray to black, designed to echo the gradient of natural diamonds used by the house. The color of the piece thus draws its logic from gem setting: the shade flows from one element to the next, much like from one stone to the next.
Next to it, “The Vault,” a monumental safe created by USM, houses the finished high-jewelry pieces. The installation reveals what the workshop rarely shows—namely, the place where the jewelry is crafted and where it is stored. It also reverses the usual roles. It is no longer the jeweler who commissions a piece of furniture to display their creations; rather, it is the furniture manufacturer who opens their own retail space to a workshop practice.
A path that others have taken before
Lara Bohinc’s career path shows that this shift can become a second profession. Trained at the Royal College of Art, she served as a jewelry consultant for Cartier for over ten years and has also worked for Montblanc and Gucci. Her first foray into furniture design came in 2014 with “Solaris,” a kinetic table. Two years later, in 2016, she officially founded Bohinc Studio, dedicated to furniture and objects. This was followed by the sculptural Afternoon Tea collection in 2021, and then, in November 2023, Utopia, a public installation for the Miami Design District consisting of seats, tables, and totems made of cork. With this latest project, a designer trained to work on a wrist-scale is now operating on the scale of urban space.
In London, Anna Jewsbury has taken a more gradual approach with Completedworks. The jewelry brand, founded in 2013, expanded into ceramic vases in 2017. It wasn’t until April 2025 that her first complete furniture line was unveiled at the Alcova exhibition, held at Villa Borsani during Milan Design Week. It includes tables, console tables, and stools in bronze and silver finishes—that is, the metals used in jewelry applied to surfaces on a different scale.
On the U.S. West Coast, J. Hannah, a Los Angeles-based design house, has been developing lighting fixtures since 2023. California-based Sophie Buhai chose Paris to showcase this dialogue. In the spring of 2025, the Galerie Anne-Sophie Duval hosted “Jewelry Objects,” an exhibition that paired her home accessories with Art Deco furniture. The gallery’s choice is telling, since Art Deco was a period when the boundary between the decorative arts, goldsmithing, and furniture design was particularly fluid.
Two Distinct Approaches
These trajectories do not all follow the same path. Lara Bohinc and Anna Jewsbury have established themselves as furniture designers in their own right, with their own collections and materials. Sophie Buhai has focused on engaging with historical pieces. Bernard James took the opposite approach: he immersed himself in the vocabulary of a manufacturer whose system has long been established and altered its use rather than its form. The Haller ball joint holds a stick of incense, the lacquered steel drawer protects silver from tarnishing, and the workbench echoes the paving pattern of a piece of jewelry in a gradient of grays.
This approach has its limitations. The jeweler does not design furniture; he works with pre-existing pieces, and the prices of the items align with those of high-end Swiss furniture rather than those of small decorative items. It also offers a practical advantage. The three-drawer jewelry box fits into the same system as the USM furniture a customer may already own, and it’s ordered in the same way—with a four- to six-week wait before delivery.
