Pico Jewelry Collections |

Photo: Evan Schwartz photography

Montclair, New Jersey-based industrial designer Andrea Panico has designed tabletop pieces for furniture retailer west elm, served as director of product design for the world-renowed (and single-monikered) designer Clodagh, and worked at the international design firm STUDIOS Architecture. Her work with jewerly began during her graduate studies in Industrial Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and her Pico collection of jewelry is now produced in Indonesia by a team of skilled artisans the designer met while working with a furniture manufacturer in Bali (all wood used in the collection is scrap wood from nearby factories). Panico’s Little Architecture line, with almost 70 skus, translates the work of architects Santiago Calatrava, Luis Barragan, Tadao Ando, and others, into small scale jewelry structures including earrings, pendants, bracelets, and necklaces. Her accompanying Frank Lloyd Wright collection successfully brings a modern edge to Wright’s Prairie School style.

Constructed primarily from silver, Indonesian teak, and ebony, the line is sophisticated and modern without crossing over into avant-garde and uncomfortable (I strongly prefer it to most of Frank Gehry’s pieces available from Tiffanys). While perfect for fans of architecture, the collection simply has good lines, quality materials, and the stamp of a designer who has looked at product design from many angles. As Panico writes on her site, “industrial designers are like architects of small things.” If you could wear one piece of architecture, what would it be?