Graff Diamonds is a London-based jewellery house founded in 1960 by Laurence Graff, widely regarded as one of the most consequential figures in the post-war diamond trade. Beginning with a single workshop in Hatton Garden, Graff grew into an institution synonymous with the acquisition, transformation, and sale of the world's largest, rarest, and most historically significant diamonds. No other private jewellery firm has purchased as many stones that individually redefine auction records or reshape the understanding of what a diamond can be worth. The house operates retail salons across London, New York, Geneva, Hong Kong, and beyond, and maintains its own cutting and polishing facilities — a vertical integration that gives it unusual control over the journey of a stone from rough to finished jewel.

Founding and Early History

Laurence Graff was born in 1938 in Stepney, East London, and left school at fifteen to apprentice with a Hatton Garden jeweller. By his early twenties he had established his own workshop, initially producing jewellery for other retailers. The transition from manufacturer to dealer and retailer was gradual but decisive: Graff recognised that the highest margins and the greatest prestige lay not in fabrication for others but in the ownership and presentation of exceptional stones. His first Bond Street boutique opened in the 1970s, positioning the house firmly within the luxury retail tier occupied by Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels, though Graff's identity was always more narrowly and intensely focused on diamonds than either of those maisons.

The firm's early reputation rested on Laurence Graff's personal willingness to commit extraordinary capital to individual stones — a practice that required both financial nerve and an acute sense of the market for top-colour, top-clarity diamonds. This appetite for risk, consistently rewarded, became the defining characteristic of the house.

Philosophy and Market Position

Graff occupies a singular position in the jewellery world: it is simultaneously a high jewellery atelier, a major rough-diamond purchaser, and an active participant in the secondary market for historic stones. Most luxury jewellery houses design around stones sourced from dealers; Graff frequently sources, cuts, and sets its own material, and has on numerous occasions purchased stones at auction only to recut them — accepting the loss of weight in exchange for the gain of a superior cut grade or the removal of a clarity characteristic.

The house's aesthetic is maximalist and unapologetically opulent. Graff jewellery tends toward large centre stones, elaborate pavé surrounds, and constructions of considerable technical complexity. Critics within the trade occasionally describe the style as more demonstrative than restrained; admirers point to the sheer quality of the material as justification for the scale. Either way, the house has never sought the understated register of, say, JAR or Hemmerle. It speaks loudly, in diamonds.

Notable Diamond Acquisitions

The catalogue of important stones that have passed through Graff's hands is without parallel among private jewellery firms. Several merit individual attention.

The Graff Pink

Perhaps the most celebrated single acquisition in the house's history, the stone now known as the Graff Pink is a Fancy Intense pink diamond of 24.78 carats, rated Internally Flawless by the Gemological Institute of America. The diamond had been in the collection of the American jeweller Harry Winston before passing into private hands, where it remained largely unseen for decades. When it appeared at Sotheby's Geneva in November 2010, Laurence Graff purchased it for approximately 46.16 million US dollars — at that moment the highest price ever paid at auction for a jewel of any kind. The stone's combination of size, colour saturation, and clarity grade is essentially without precedent in the documented auction record for pink diamonds.

The Lesotho Promise

In 2006, Graff acquired the Lesotho Promise, a 603-carat Type IIa rough diamond recovered from the Letseng mine in Lesotho — at the time of its discovery the fifteenth largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found. Graff's cutting team divided the stone into 26 polished diamonds, the largest of which, a 75.36-carat D-flawless emerald cut, was subsequently set into a necklace. The project demonstrated the house's capacity to manage the entire pipeline from rough acquisition through cutting to finished jewellery at the very highest level of the trade.

The Graff Vendôme and Other D-Flawless Stones

Graff has, over several decades, accumulated what is likely the largest private inventory of D-colour, Flawless or Internally Flawless diamonds in the world. The house has purchased numerous stones from De Beers' exceptional-stone tenders and from auction houses, and has consistently been willing to pay premiums that other buyers decline. This concentration of top-grade material is both a commercial strategy and a statement of identity: Graff presents itself as the destination for clients who will accept no compromise on colour or clarity.

The Graff Ruby

While diamonds define the house, Graff has also been active in the coloured-stone market. The Graff Ruby — an 8.62-carat cushion-cut Burmese ruby from Mogok, set in a ring — sold at Sotheby's Geneva in May 2015 for approximately 8.6 million US dollars, establishing a per-carat world auction record for ruby at the time. The stone exemplifies the Mogok ideal: a vivid, slightly purplish red with strong fluorescence and the characteristic silky inclusions associated with the valley's finest material.

The Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond

In December 2008, Graff purchased the Wittelsbach Diamond — a historic 35.56-carat Fancy Deep greyish-blue stone with a documented provenance stretching to the seventeenth-century Spanish crown — at Christie's London for approximately 24.3 million US dollars, then a world auction record for any diamond. Graff subsequently had the stone recut by his own craftsmen, reducing it to 31.06 carats but improving its colour grade from Fancy Deep to Fancy Vivid and its clarity from VS2 to Internally Flawless. The decision to recut a stone of such historical significance was controversial among gemmologists and historians; Graff argued that the recut revealed the stone's true optical potential. The diamond was renamed the Wittelsbach-Graff and sold to the Emir of Qatar in 2011.

High Jewellery: The Hallucination and Fascination Watches

Graff's most technically ambitious creations extend beyond conventional jewellery into the domain of horological art. The Hallucination watch, unveiled at Baselworld in 2014, was described at the time as the world's most expensive watch, with a retail price of approximately 55 million US dollars. The piece is set with more than 110 carats of rare fancy-colour diamonds — including vivid yellow, vivid pink, vivid blue, vivid green, vivid orange, and vivid purple stones — arranged across a flexible bracelet of extraordinary complexity. The watch movement itself is almost incidental to the jewellery; the piece is primarily a demonstration of what is possible when a house controls a sufficient inventory of exceptional fancy-colour diamonds to assemble them in a single object.

The Fascination watch, introduced in 2015, operates on a different principle: it is a transformable jewel in which a 38.13-carat pear-shaped D-flawless diamond — itself a remarkable stone — can be detached from the bracelet and worn as a ring. The watch mechanism is concealed beneath the diamond, revealed only when the stone is removed. Both pieces exemplify Graff's approach to high jewellery: the technical challenge is real, the materials are irreproachable, and the result is deliberately spectacular.

Mining and Vertical Integration

Graff's involvement in the diamond pipeline extends upstream into mining. The house has held interests in the Letseng mine in Lesotho — the highest-elevation diamond mine in the world and one known for producing an exceptional proportion of large, high-quality stones relative to its total output — through its association with Gem Diamonds. Letseng has yielded several of the most important rough diamonds of the twenty-first century, and Graff's early and sustained engagement with the mine reflects a strategic recognition that access to exceptional rough is the ultimate competitive advantage in the top tier of the diamond trade.

Auction Activity and Record-Setting

Few names appear more frequently in the provenance sections of major diamond auction catalogues than Graff. The house has been both buyer and consignor at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips across Geneva, New York, Hong Kong, and London. Its purchases have set or equalled world auction records for white diamonds, pink diamonds, blue diamonds, and rubies at various points over the past three decades. This auction presence serves multiple functions: it acquires material that would not otherwise be available, it establishes public price benchmarks that support the valuation of the house's existing inventory, and it generates the kind of international press coverage that no advertising budget can replicate.

The Graff Aesthetic and Craftsmanship

Graff jewellery is made in the house's London atelier, where a team of craftsmen — many trained in the traditional Hatton Garden and Valenza traditions — execute designs that typically originate with Laurence Graff himself or with the house's design team. The settings are almost invariably in platinum or white gold for white diamonds, and in yellow or rose gold for fancy-colour stones, following the long-established convention that warm metal tones enhance the apparent saturation of yellow and orange diamonds. Pavé work is dense and precisely executed; prong settings for large centre stones are engineered to minimise metal visibility. The overall impression is of jewellery in which every element is subordinated to the display of the stone.

The house has also produced significant coloured-stone jewellery beyond the ruby already noted — emeralds, sapphires, and alexandrites have all appeared in important Graff pieces — but diamonds, and particularly white diamonds of the highest grades and fancy-colour diamonds of the rarest hues, remain the core of the identity.

Legacy and Influence

Laurence Graff received an OBE in 2013 for services to the jewellery industry and to philanthropy; the Graff Foundation has supported educational and humanitarian projects in southern Africa, a region with which the house has deep commercial ties through its mining interests. He was appointed CBE in 2019.

The house's influence on the market for exceptional diamonds is difficult to overstate. By consistently paying prices that other buyers regarded as aggressive, Graff helped establish a new price architecture for D-flawless diamonds above ten carats, for fancy vivid pink and blue diamonds, and for large Type IIa rough stones. Competitors who once regarded these prices as unsustainable have, over time, been obliged to revise their models. In this sense, Graff has not merely participated in the market for the world's finest diamonds — it has, to a significant degree, created it.

The question of succession and the house's long-term institutional identity — whether it can sustain its singular position without the personal vision and financial commitment of its founder — is one that the trade watches with interest. For the moment, Graff remains what it has been for more than six decades: the most concentrated expression in the jewellery world of the conviction that the finest diamonds are, quite simply, beyond comparison.

Further Reading

• GIA Gems & Gemology: The Graff Pink Diamond
• GIA Gems & Gemology: The Wittelsbach-Graff Diamond
• GIA Gems & Gemology: The Lesotho Promise