Britt’s Pick: Leto Lama’s Precious Garden Ring

By Brittany Siminitz | September 21, 2026

Some gardens are planted, others are painted. Leto Lama’s is set in gold.

The London-based designer’s one-of-a-kind Precious Garden ring was inspired by Monet’s garden at Giverny, as well as his painting The Artist’s Garden at Giverny. But rather than reproduce the scene literally, Lama transforms its layered color and what she calls its “controlled wildness” into a tiny landscape of emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, and textured gold.

“I wanted to translate that atmosphere into gemstones,” she says, “allowing the stones to behave almost like flowers and fragments of a garden within the composition.”

That feels like exactly the right way to describe the finished jewel. A large emerald gives the eye somewhere to land, but it doesn’t function like a conventional center stone. Around it, gemstones of different colors, sizes, shapes, and opacity appear to grow across the domed surface rather than line up neatly around it.

The effect is painterly, and that’s no accident.

Lama begins by forming the ring’s gold dome, which she then treats almost like a blank canvas. Rather than mapping every gemstone placement digitally before fabrication, she lays the stones directly onto the metal and moves them around until the composition begins to take shape. Only then does she begin drilling and setting—but even that doesn’t lock the design into place.

“As the stones begin to sit within the gold, I can see the relationships between them much more clearly, so the arrangement changes further and intuitively as I work,” Lama explains. “In that sense, it’s a little like drawing on a canvas, but with gemstones.”

One stone in particular demonstrates just how much those individual materials contribute to the larger picture. A milky Vietnamese sapphire has a translucence and soft blush-pink color that Lama says reminded her immediately of peony petals. “It has that same delicate, almost powdery quality,” she says, “which felt completely at home in the garden-like landscape of the ring.”

Alongside more saturated stones, that softness gives the composition another dimension. The ring isn’t simply a collection of the brightest gems Lama could assemble; like a painting, it needs contrast. “The emerald grounds the ring’s composition, but I wanted the rest of the stones to have their own presence, too,” she says. “You need areas of intensity, quieter passages, changes of scale, and moments where the eye can rest.”

That balancing act seems especially important in a jewel like this one. With so many colors and shapes occupying such a small area, it would be easy for “lush” to become “chaotic.” Instead, Lama keeps working until the stones “feel like they belong to the same landscape rather than simply sitting beside one another.”

Even the gold contributes to that landscape. Its irregular, hand-worked surface gives the ring a warmth Lama associates with soil, sand, and other natural textures. “I like that the hand of the maker remains visible,” she shares, “almost like a handprint or an unsigned signature left behind by the process.”

That also may be one of the best-selling stories for a retailer presenting a jewel like this. Every Leto Lama piece is made only once, but its singularity doesn’t come simply from labeling it one of a kind. It emerges from a process that would be difficult to reproduce even if the designer wanted to.

The stones differ. Their placement evolves. The metal retains evidence of the hand that worked it. And the final composition exists only because all of those variables happened to come together in this particular jewel. And yet, Lama hopes none of that is what the customer thinks about first.

“I hope the customer’s first response is emotional,” she says. “That someone sees the jewel and simply feels drawn to it before they start thinking about why.”

Top: Precious Garden ring in 18k yellow gold with 1.1 cts. t.w. sapphires, 0.89 ct. t.w. emeralds, and 0.1 ct. t.w. diamonds, $8,769; Leto Lama