A Sterling Eye

A Sterling Eye

Michele Abeles

Detail of the handmade 1929 Tiffany tea and coffee service owned by Grant Walsh

Michele Abeles

Margo Grant Walsh, at home in Manhattan, with a handmade 1929 Tiffany tea and coffee service, at right, and a 1920s ivory-handled Jensen coffee pot on a Mexican tray, in foreground. All her silver objects are functional but rarely used.

Thorvald Bindesboll Josef Hoffmann Josef Hoffmann

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A vast array of silver objects greets visitors at Margo Grant Walsh’s apartment in midtown Manhattan. Pitchers, bowls, candlesticks, tea sets, creamers and trays fill the floor-to-ceiling shelves and sit on scattered side tables in all the rooms. Ask about the collection, and you will receive a generous response: The 71-year-old Grant Walsh can rattle off anecdotes about every glossy handcrafted piece—why it matters in the history of design, where she found it and how it relates to the rest of her holdings.

Having retired after more than 30 years at the global architecture and design firm Gensler, Grant Walsh, an interior designer who was the firm’s first female partner, now spends much of her time cultivating, expanding and giving talks about her collection. The 1,200 pieces—mostly silver but with some copper, bronze, aluminum and pewter objects among them—date from the 1880s to the present and come from 20 countries, including Mexico, Canada and various European nations. They range from luxury items—such as the 1929 Tiffany tea and coffee set with sinuous leafy legs and the 1904 strap-work-pattern service for 12 by San Francisco’s Shreve & Co.—to what Grant Walsh describes as “mysterious unsigned copper boxes, maybe made by apprentices as training pieces or presents for their wives or girlfriends.”

As befits someone who specialized in designing office spaces for bankers, lawyers and Fortune 500 companies—she also did the airy interiors for Christie’s New York—Grant Walsh buys only functional silver. “No trophies, no church or commemorative silver, no table sculpture,” she says firmly. The pieces are more for show than for personal use, however. She displays them on custom-made shelves by the dozens, in rotation, interspersed with items representing her other collections: bright-colored Imari and Lambeth Doulton ceramics, 1930s prints of Art Deco rug designs, folk-art game boards. Countless more silver objects, swathed in tissue paper and bubble wrap, are stashed in closets, drawers and trunks. Grant Walsh also keeps a few hundred in warehouses and on display at her second home, a duplex loft in Portland, Oregon. (She gave the Portland Art Museum 250 pieces in 2002.)

Sporting round spectacles with thick dark frames, Grant Walsh bounces from topic to topic in rapid-fire sentences as she points out recurring motifs—hairpin handles, scalloped rims and barklike textures on compotes, trays and fish knives—and explains the links she has discovered among the silver makers of the past 130 years. She apologizes on the rare occasions when she can’t remember a name or date or the current whereabouts
of particular treasures.

She’s been collecting for 26 years, buying at antiques shops, flea markets and auctions worldwide. “It was my one form of relaxation on business trips,” she explains. Retirement has allowed her to spend half the year on silver-related travel, whether giving talks to museum audiences and collector groups, checking on exhibited and stored pieces or buying as far afield as Argentina and New Zealand.

“Her clarity and enthusiasm leave audiences spellbound,” says Christopher Hartop, a silver consultant in England and a former Christie’s vice president. He doesn’t give Grant Walsh much buying advice—they’re friends, and she has joined tours he’s led to private art collections across the U.S. and in Scandinavia, South America and the Netherlands. She’s popped into antiques stores on all those trips. “She likes to get out there herself, for the old-fashioned thrill of the chase,” Hartop says. “She doesn’t rely on any one dealer or minder calling her whenever they get in something they predict she’ll like. She collects from the gut and from the heart. Her personality comes through more than in any other silver collection I know.”

Grant Walsh attributes her mania partly to silver’s monochrome planes, which suit her modernist taste in interiors, and to its portability—impulse buys can be easily stashed in her luggage. Silver objects also fascinate her as a design puzzle: How many ways can a silversmith shape a fish fork, say, or a ladle? “I love seeing the different solutions, inspirations and viewpoints—how designers have explored the possibilities of the material,” she says. The ornamentation on her serving-spoon handles, for instance, ranges from austere flutes to hand-hammered dents to floral encrustations, while the spoon bowls can be hemispherical or lacily pierced. She’s drawn as well by silver’s durability: “So many of my own interiors from early in my career have been renovated and retrofitted—they’re barely recognizable. That kind of destruction almost never happens to silver. It has a wonderful lasting quality.”