‘Kutchinsky’s Egg’ Outlines One Jeweler’s Obsession and His Downfall

By Karen Dybis | March 26, 2026

Journalist Serena Kutchinsky says her family’s jewelry legacy at the House of Kutchinsky and the story of its infamous golden egg are bittersweet—one she only shared when she was looking to entertain her friends.

That changed when she pitched an article for Father’s Day to a publication she’d contributed to. Writing about her father’s creation took it out of her past and into her present, and led her on a decade-long search for the egg.

The search led to her first book, Kutchinsky’s Egg: A Family Story of Obsession, Love, and Loss, out today from Simon & Schuster. It is a “truth is stranger than fiction” kind of tale, Kutchinsky says, and this memoir has changed her life. She’s regained her love for jewelry, learned more about her father, and found the egg that had basically disappeared for more than 20 years.

Kutchinsky egg — *Kutchinsky’s egg, aka the Argyle Library Egg, reportedly took 7,000 hours to make.*

“Once I started telling the story properly, I realized it wasn’t complete unless I knew what had actually happened to the egg,” Kutchinsky says. “A family friend jokingly bet me £100 that I wouldn’t be able to find it—which, in retrospect, was exactly the kind of provocation I needed. That’s when the hunt really began.”

In Kutchinsky’s Egg, the London-based author relates how her father, Paul—who, as heir to the House of Kutchinsky, a British jewelry maison founded in 1893, had hobnobbed with royals—decided to invest his time and his family’s fortune in creating a jeweled egg to outdo rival Fabergé.

The Argyle Library Egg, as it was known upon its completion in 1990, stood two feet fall, held more than 20,000 pink diamonds, and was made with 15 kilograms—about 33 pounds—of gold. Paul Kutchinsky hoped to sell the egg, but no one would buy it, and it ruined the business financially. An affair Paul had ruined his marriage.

“In our family, the egg was less an object and more a fault line. It ran right through my childhood, dividing things into before and after,” Serena says. “For years, we simply didn’t talk about it. And when it did come up, it was met with dark looks or shut down entirely. My mother spoke about it almost as if it were a person—something that had taken my father from us, destabilized everything, and left a kind of emotional wreckage behind.”

Egg book cover — *The U.K. edition of Kutchinsky’s book features a blue background and slightly different wording of the title than the U.S. edition, which has a red cover.*

A couple of years after its creation, the egg disappeared from public view (and knowledge of its whereabouts). In researching her book, Kutchinsky says she sought to find out not only what had happened to the egg but why her father took on such a strange project in the first place. That story is told in Kutchinsky’s Egg—but you’ll just have to buy a copy to find out what occurred.

“As a child, it felt like something dark and unknowable—this huge, glittering thing that had somehow upended our lives,” says Kutchinsky. “It’s why I’ve called it a ‘monster’ before. Not because of what it was, but because of what it represented. Writing the book has completely shifted that.”

On March 19, London jeweler Berganza hosted a book release party and exhibited a selection of Kutchinsky pieces, offering attendees the rare opportunity to experience their craftsmanship, and distinctive style.

Kutchinsky has also promoted her book on jewelry historian Carol Woolton’s podcast, If Jewels Could Talk. In a blurb on the book, Woolton calls it “rich in details, sharp in suspense, and devastating in its revelations.”

Kutchinsky tells JCK, “I grew up assuming the House of Kutchinsky would always be there, and with that came a quiet pressure. I was scared of disappointing my father by not wanting to follow him into the business, especially as he had followed his own father before him. There was a sense of lineage I didn’t quite know how to step into.”

The book “has been genuinely cathartic” for Kutchinsky, she says. “Taking something that was once associated with loss, instability, and silence, and turning it into something that can be understood—and even celebrated—has been incredibly powerful.

“What I feel now is a sense of having reclaimed it. I’ve created a legacy—not just for my father, not just for the egg, but for our whole family. And for my sons, Caspian and Finlo, who will now grow up knowing the story of their grandfather and his giant golden egg.”

Top: Paul Kutchinsky, whose daughter Serena has written a new book about his family’s jewelry business and the two-foot-tall bejeweled egg he created (photos courtesy of Serena Kutchinsky)