Elizabeth Locke: Beauty by Design
Written by Diane Helentjaris | Photos courtesy of Elizabeth Locke
Jewelry designer Elizabeth Locke celebrates beauty. Like the poet John Keats, her work underlines the idea that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever.” With a skill bordering on alchemy, she mixes stones, pearls, and remnants of antiquity with gold. The results are jewels that Locke says “look like they come out of a Byzantine tomb.”
There is a serendipitous quality to Locke’s career trajectory. Growing up in Staunton, Virginia, as the child of an English professor, she “never thought I would end up making my living with rocks.” She was, however, “always interested in the natural world” and “always loved rocks.” Her father took the family on summer trips to the Mediterranean, including Italy. Later, she returned to Italy as a Middlebury College graduate student, studying Italian literature in Florence. After six years abroad, she came back to the States and began working as a writer.
On assignment for Town & Country in 1988, Locke traveled to Bangkok. She watched as Thai goldsmiths handmade gold jewelry, piece by piece. Eschewing molds, they tapped the lustrous metal into shape with tiny hammers and beaded it into decorative droplets. Locke was entranced. Following that trip, she borrowed $20,000 from her father-in-law, dipped into her husband’s frequent flyer miles, and returned to Bangkok with her first jewelry designs.
These initial efforts, inspired by what she saw in the Western market at the time, fizzled. She pivoted to designs tuned to her own unique aesthetic. Soon, one of her rings made the cover of W Magazine. Sales took off, and she has remained true to her own vision since then. More than 30 years later, she continues to work with 20 of these same Thai goldsmiths, traveling to Thailand several times a year. She estimates having spent “six years of my life in Bangkok.”
“I love what I do,” Locke says, and feels “lucky I get to do what I do… [I am] never bored.” Her designs start with the stones and antique treasures, both of which she personally collects from a wide range of sources. All her jewelry is completely handmade. She sets it in 19-karat gold, finding it a good combination of color and workability. Locke employs a variety of stones to give herself a large palette of colors: pink tourmaline, blue chalcedony, rose quartz, green peridot, diamonds, iridescent pearls. She is a fan of dome-shaped cabochons.
A hallmark of Locke’s jewelry is its incorporation of antique elements such as Italian micromosaics, Chinese mother-of-pearl gambling counters, Essex crystal, Japanese satsuma buttons, and ancient Roman and Greek coins. Venetian glass intaglios are created from 17th-century molds. She repurposes them all into charms, dangles, and pendants.
Her use of micromosaics is particularly intriguing. These miniature works of Roman art were favorite mementos of European travelers in the late 18th to 19th centuries. Usually only a few inches in size, these handmade pieces were composed of opaque glass or enamel cut into tesserae, tiny pieces. As many as 1,400 tesserae per square inch recreated famous paintings, celebrated plants and animals, captured views of ancient ruins, and portrayed bucolic landscapes.
Her collection of micromosaics was showcased by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the 2019 exhibition “A Return to the Grand Tour: Micromosaic Jewels from the Collection of Elizabeth Locke.” The exhibit traveled to the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston in 2020. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts then published a 118-page catalogue, which is available through Elizabeth Locke Jewels.
Eventually, as Locke’s jewelry designing burgeoned, her husband advised her to open a shop. Today, she has two: one at 968 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, not too far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Central Park Model Boat Pond. The second shop opened in 2000 in Boyce, Virginia, the Clarke County village of less than 800 residents south of Berryville.
To focus the concept for her Boyce shop, Locke wove a backstory. Printed copies of “The Contessa’s Story” are on hand at the former general store. In the tale, Locke claims to have an evil twin sister, also named Elizabeth and the widow of a Venetian count. The handout is replete with the contessa’s coat of arms and family motto, “Cave minoris aestimes credulitatem hominum.” With Locke’s sly humor, it translates to: “Beware of underestimating the gullibility of man.” The evil twin reportedly lives at the shop, which explains its Venetian palazzo décor. Fully indulging in this creative fantasy, Locke flew in Italian decorative painter Marquesa Maddalena Afan de Rivera to transform the oak floor into Byzantine faux marble. She also commissioned Swiss artist Michael Niklaus to create an Elvis shrine in the store’s back corner.
With so much to see and jewelry even more mesmerizing, Elizabeth Locke Jewels promises an experience worth the trip. “[We] welcome people to come and look,” Locke says. The shop is open weekend afternoons and by appointment, with more information available at elizabethlocke.com. ML
Published in the March 2026 issue of Middleburg Life.