Three generations at the same desk.

He was young and he had nothing. No store, no name, nobody in this city who owed him a favor. What he had was a good eye and the nerve to keep showing up.

He started downtown, because that is where the trade was, and he learned it the way everyone learned it then — in person, one stone at a time, from people who didn't give anything away. Later he moved out to the Galleria area. At his best he had half a floor of the building.

He was loud. He was funny. He was generous in a way that cost him money more than once and never once seemed to bother him. He kept diamonds loose all over his desk — not in a case, not in a safe, on the desk next to the coffee — and he always knew exactly what was there.

Ask a jeweler in Houston who has been around long enough and they'll know the name. Not because he advertised. Because he sold them their stones.

He died in 2021. There isn't a person in this trade who doesn't have a story about him.

Rafael — everybody calls him Rafi — has been doing this for more than thirty years. He runs The Office almost single-handed.

He'll price a piece in his head before you've finished opening the calculator on your phone, and he'll be right. Customers who met him when they were twenty still call and ask for him by name. Some of them are buying for their own children now.

Amnon's grandson grew up around the trays and the phone calls and the arguing over a stone. He's twenty-four, and he's in the business now too.

What we're building is the one thing Amnon never needed: a way for people who don't already know us to find us. For sixty-two years this ran on someone telling someone else. That works, and it's slow. So we're photographing what's in the case, putting the real price next to it, and picking up the phone ourselves.

Nothing about how we buy or what we charge changes. The only difference is that now you can find us without knowing a guy.

We're upstairs in an office building off Westheimer, in the Galleria area. There's a buzzer at the door. Someone lets you in, someone else carries trays out from the back, and there are usually two or three conversations going at once. Nobody sits down. It's loud.

We're not going to apologize for any of that.