The pavé sphere

A holly wreath on Harry Winston's front door, its leaves glittering with frost on a winter night, is the story usually told about the Winston Cluster. What the house records is the method. In the early 1940s its studio set pear, marquise and round diamonds at different angles on a platinum frame so slight that the stones, not the metal, drew the shape. The same instinct runs through pavé, from the French for a paving stone: small diamonds laid as close as cobbles until no metal shows and a whole surface glitters as one.

Paris used the technique to draw. Boucheron paved its Serpent Bohème drop with diamonds when the line appeared in 1968, and Van Cleef & Arpels gathers seven round stones into a single Fleurette, with almost no metal showing. Since then the field has been pulled in opposite directions. Messika, founded in 2005, ruled it into straight strokes for Gatsby, after the geometric diamond bracelets of the 1920s. Pomellato's Sabbia sets white, brown and black diamonds of mixed sizes at uneven heights, so the dome looks like sand in sunlight. And in 2010 Harry Winston brought its cluster down to daily scale with Lily Cluster, working from studio drawings of the 1940s.