Our Story
Widow's business card
One of the quieter ironies of the collecting life is that what matters most is rarely what you set out to find.
Years ago, when I was tracking down old watches with youthful enthusiasm, word reached me that the widow of a well-known collector was selling her entire collection. Without hesitation, I booked the first available flight to Paris, eager to get there before the collection fell into the hands of dealers and was scattered to the four winds.
I was exceptionally lucky then, although before we could meet, I had to call upon many an acquaintance and ask many a favor. When she finally agreed to see me, we talked for four days from dawn until midnight—about the collection, and with each passing day, more and more about the man who had assembled it. When everything was done, I had acquired as much as my budget allowed, which at the time was considerably more modest than my enthusiasm.
Two of the pieces I had purchased required work that was beyond the capabilities of any watchmaker I knew. When I mentioned this, the collector slid a business card toward me—as gently as if it were one of her jewels. The card itself looked as though it had been printed a century earlier. “Call here,” she said. “He has been looking after my jewelry for nearly fifty years.”
I knew a little about her taste, and considerably more about her jewelry, so I was inclined to trust her. There was, however, one problem: the man on the card was a jeweler, not a watchmaker. She remained undeterred—I was to go to him. There was another problem as well: I was due to fly home that very evening.
Without delay, I called the number provided, mentioned her name, and after a few seconds was told that he could make time for me. Then I turned to a friend who had recently bought an old Porsche 930, asking him to drive me to the address given, some one hundred and thirty kilometers from the center of Paris.
Workshop
The plan, if you can call it that, was simple: leave the watches, explain what needed to be done, sign what needed to be signed, and make it to the airport before departure. We arrived on time, although—as it turned out later—we couldn't avoid a few speeding tickets, which, as the mastermind behind the entire trip, I considered my duty.
We stopped in front of the gate to the estate, which clearly remembered better days. Just past the entrance, before the main building, stood an old outbuilding. My friend looked at it, then at me, and asked—jokingly, or so I thought—whether it wouldn't be better to leave the engine running. Just in case.
When I opened the door, I was enveloped by the smell of smoke and machine oil, and before my eyes appeared one of the most extraordinary workshops I had ever seen. In the farthest corner, under a dim lamp and in a bluish haze, sat a figure I took for a jeweller, although I admit that some part of me was still expecting a robed Frenchman with a double-barrelled shotgun.
I was twenty-two at the time, and my youth usually inspired distrust in the trade—I was looked at the way one looks at a watch dial that is just a little too beautiful to be genuine. Here, none of that.
“So you have come after all!” a voice called out from the depths of the haze, to my surprise in Polish, although with a strong French accent. The figure rose to welcome me. His handshake was firm, surprisingly firm for a man I reckoned to be some eighty years old. He introduced himself: Antoni.
Not an hour had passed before I had a feeling that this meeting could change my life, although I could not yet say how. At one point my friend peered inside, perhaps wondering whether he really shouldn't have left the engine running. Antoni brought up a bottle of wine from the cellar, and another two hours passed unnoticed. I missed my plane, and in the end, I stayed in France for another week.
After returning to London, where I lived at the time, everything seemed strangely tasteless. I missed the smell of that workshop, and I missed Antoni, who could speak of machines with a passion I had never encountered anywhere else.
Kraków, 1931
Antoni believed in the principle of humility, and out of respect for it, certain details of his life will remain where he left them: between the two of us.
His story begins in Kraków in 1931. He was the youngest of three children and remembered those years with affection, although there were not many of them. In 1939, when he was eight years old, he had to leave his family and went away under the care of a friend of his father. This friend's family had settled in France even earlier, during the Great Emigration after the fall of the November Uprising, and the friend himself had long divided his life between the two countries.
When Antoni was ten years old, news reached him that his parents had died and his siblings had scattered to England. Three years later, pneumonia also took his guardian, and thirteen-year-old Antoni was left alone, relying solely on his own wits.
Fate, having taken so much from him, finally showed a little mercy. The family whose servant his guardian was took the boy under their roof and, in essence, adopted him. I will not give their name, out of respect for their living descendants, but over the years he was increasingly introduced into the daily life of the castle. He was primarily a servant's assistant there, yet for the first time in years he felt at home. He helped maintain the estate's library, and lived alone in the outbuilding that before him had been occupied by his guardian, once the family's tutor of art and culture.
In 1948, when the war was becoming merely a tragic memory, seventeen-year-old Antoni began an apprenticeship with a local jeweler, who quickly recognized his eye for detail and taught him the basics of repair.
As Antoni recounted, Europe was then teeming with jewels whose histories were better not to investigate too closely—destroyed or damaged during the war—and jewelers from some of the great Parisian houses secretly sent them to small workshops outside Paris, where they could be dealt with discreetly and at a proper distance. His task, as he remembered, was to repair what could be repaired, and at the request, remove stones from their settings and secure them with a detailed description. It was an extraordinary school in its own way, because nothing teaches the construction of a jewel like taking it apart or repairing it.
Then came the post-war years of prosperity, and with them a wave of new designs and new machines. Antoni embraced the machines with undisguised joy, mastered them to perfection, and soon began to prosper. In 1954, the workshop closed. Antoni bought back as much equipment as he could afford and opened his own studio in the outbuilding where he had grown up. It was there, more than half a century later, that I had the chance to find him.
In the jewelry world, it is an open secret that the great houses have always relied on small, independent workshops whose names are nowhere to be found in books. As a twenty-, and then thirty-year-old, Antoni ran just such a workshop, and working for Parisian jewelry houses, he learned the craft inside out—from goldsmithing to stone setting. Word, as word does, got around. Over time, some of these houses' clients found their way to his door and began to entrust him with orders and repairs without intermediaries. That is how, as I was told, he met the lady who sent me to him.
Promise
After those three months, I felt a deep need to return to that workshop, to sit, listen, and absorb as much as possible, as if I were at my own grandfather’s. Every year, between work, family, and all the other obligations that fill my calendar, I seized every opportunity to go there. I rarely had to look far.
One day, as we were talking about one of the jewels he had made in the late sixties, he interrupted me mid-sentence. Perhaps he had seen enough of my enthusiasm. “How about I teach you how to make things like that?” he asked. I was twenty-three years old and worked in a completely different field. “Then I’d have to become a jeweler!” I replied with a laugh.
What followed were a few years of lessons on machines, making my own tools, and so on, punctuated by countless trips, while all the while Antoni repaired, designed, and made unique pieces for my own collection. Finally, he had me promise that one day I would find my place in this trade and that I would not give up when he was gone. He died shortly thereafter.
Today, almost two years later, I am trying to keep that promise in the only way I know how: with humility, learning everything anew, in the hope that I can preserve at least a fraction of the passion Antoni poured into every hour at the workbench for over half a century. My skills are but a fraction of what he could do at my age. Yet I would like to devote the coming years, and if fate allows, decades, to forging what he taught me and the notes he left me into things that can be held in one’s hand: objects carefully designed, shaped, and finished, which—I hope—will give those who wear them at least a little of the joy Antoni gave me.
If my hands gain proficiency, and if over time a team gathers around me, I would like to create more brands, each with its own vision, and to contribute in a modest way to bringing this craft back to Poland as if returning home—Antoni’s lifelong dream. We were both Poles who spent almost our entire lives away from our homeland, and it still amazes me that we met in a foreign land and were united by a single dream: that this craft would flourish in Poland once again. I am glad that this journey begins here, in Kraków, in the city where he was born.
The first step is Maison Bubbe. The name comes from the affectionate word Antoni used to greet his oldest and closest clients. There was so much warmth in that greeting that I know of no better way to describe this man—the man without whom I would never have sat at a jeweler’s bench.
Thank you, Antoni.
I also thank all the goldsmiths who have shown me so much patience and kindness since then, helping me polish what Antoni left me.