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.”

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.