In February, Grant Walsh renovated her apartment to increase the shelf space not only for her silver objects but also for her extensive library on the subject. Placed end to end, her collection of books would stretch 90 feet. “If it has the S-word in the title, I buy it,” she says, laughing. In March she added to the field’s scholarship with a monograph, Collecting by Design: Silver & Metalwork of the Twentieth Century from the Margo Grant Walsh Collection. It covers the 475 pieces, dating from the 1880s to 2003, that she exhibited in San Francisco Airport’s International Terminal last year. Yale University Press is publishing the volume in conjunction with an exhibition of 78 architect-designed objects from Grant Walsh’s collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through August 3. The items run from circa 1900 garnet and moonstone brooches by Arts & Crafts specialists from Britain (Charles Robert Ashbee) and Denmark (Thorvald Bindesbøll) to a 2003 tea and coffee set with pear-shaped vessels that SANAA—the Tokyo architecture firm best known for designing the New Museum in New York—created for Alessi.

The inspiration for Grant Walsh’s first buying sprees, in the 1980s, was a collection of mostly Colonial silver that belonged to a Gensler client, a New York investment banker who asked her to design a vitrine at his office for a 17th-century American silver tankard. In 1982, after purchasing a small circa 1910 dish by the Kalo Shop, an Arts & Crafts silversmith collective in Chicago, for $200 at a New York show, she decided to focus on post-1880 silver objects.

“I realized the market for them wasn’t that competitive,” she explains. “Most buyers didn’t know anything about the makers, and there aren’t fakes to worry about. Prices were relatively affordable—not like Colonial silver, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—and they’re still relatively affordable.” Grant Walsh usually pays from $500 to $5,000, with occasional splurges in the $25,000 range. In 2006 she spent $40,000 for a fluted 1920s vase by Josef Hoffmann, which is on view at the Houston show.

For all her globetrotting and her cosmopolitan career—she founded Gensler’s satellite offices in Boston and London—Grant Walsh still collects pieces that remind her of her childhood on a Native American reservation in North Dakota. Her Chippewa father, a painting contractor, built the family a four-room house with no electricity or running water; Grant Walsh’s mother taught at the reservation’s one-room schoolhouse. Margo, who cleaned houses to put herself through the University of Oregon’s interior architecture department, has 30 Navajo, Zuni and Hopi silver pieces—mostly hand-pounded jewelry, buckles and salad servers studded with turquoise or coral. “The Native American pieces have a strong Arts & Crafts aesthetic, and they’re distinctive and original,” she says. “At the San Francisco Airport show, I put a dozen Native American pieces in the same case with some hand-wrought Tiffany pieces, as examples of genuine, nonderivative American silversmithing.”

Just keeping track of her scattered acquisitions now takes up a healthy chunk of her day whenever she’s in New York. In a ground-floor maid’s room that she owns in her building, file cabinets overflow with silver photos and documentation. She’s been computerizing her records lately; the spreadsheet inventory runs to 50 pages.

“I still want more examples from most of the countries that I already have represented,” she says. “And I have so many pieces that I want to keep researching. I’m obsessed with learning as much about this subject as I can. I'll probably still be at this when I'm 101.”

"A Sterling Eye" originally appeared in the May 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2008 Table of Contents.