Griffon Black Leather Gentleman's Jewellery Case, Applied Gilt Crown on a Red Velvet Lid Panel, Gold-Tooled Double-Line Borders, Fitted Red Velvet Interior with Cufflink Rack and Lid Straps, Box Made in Sweden, c. 1950–1970

The Piece

A hinged rectangular dresser case in black leather, made to sit out rather than be put away.

The lid is tooled in gold with a double-line border — two parallel rules run in with a heated roll, following the edge the whole way round and turning square at each corner.

Inside that border the lid carries an inset panel of red velvet, and at the centre of the panel an applied gilt crown, raised and separately fixed rather than printed or stamped into the surface.

The interior is lined throughout in red velvet and divided into compartments.

Across one division stands a slotted rack — a velvet-covered bar cut with narrow slits, made so that cufflinks and studs stand upright in a row instead of lying loose in a heap.

Under the lid are retaining straps, set horizontally, which grip a tie bar or a collar pin flat against the velvet so it does not drop when the box is opened.

Marked in gold inside the lid, in two lines: GRIFFON above BOX MADE IN SWEDEN.

History & Provenance

The mark inside the lid describes a division of labour, and it is the most informative thing on the box. “Griffon” is the house whose jewellery came in it. “Box made in Sweden” is the country of origin of the case itself, stamped separately because the case and its contents came from different countries.

Sweden built an export industry out of presentation casework. Through the middle of the century the Malmö case factories — Skandinaviska Etuifabriken chief among them, trading as Skandetui — supplied fitted leather and leathercloth cases to jewellery houses abroad, and the American men’s jewellery trade was their largest customer. Swank of New York, the biggest name in the category, boxed a great deal of its output in Swedish cases stamped exactly this way.

American men’s jewellery was a gift business, and the box did the selling. Cufflinks, tie bars, collar stays and studs were bought for other people — at Christmas, at graduation, on Father’s Day — by buyers who could not judge the jewellery and could immediately judge the case. So the houses spent on the case: real leather, gold tooling, velvet, a fitted interior. A great deal of the perceived value of a pair of cufflinks in 1958 was sitting underneath them.

The interior fittings are the clearest evidence of what it held. A slotted rack is a cufflink rack and nothing else — the slits exist to take the shank of a link or the post of a stud so the face stands up and can be read at a glance. The horizontal straps under the lid are tie-bar straps. Both fittings belong to a specific wardrobe: a man dressing in a shirt with french cuffs and a collar that needed holding down, which is to say ordinary business dress from the war years through to the end of the 1960s.

The crown is a decorative convention of the Swedish case trade, not a hallmark. Crowns appear constantly on Scandinavian casework of these decades as a signal of quality and formality — sometimes one, sometimes three. It carries no royal warrant, no maker’s identity and no date, and it should not be read as any of those things. It is there because a crown made a box look expensive, and it worked.

Then the cuff changed and the category went with it. Barrel cuffs with sewn-on buttons replaced french cuffs in mass shirting, business dress loosened through the 1970s, and the daily need for cufflinks disappeared. The jewellery mostly got broken up and sold on. The boxes, having no wearing part and being too handsome to throw out, survived in far greater numbers than their contents — which is why a fitted case like this one is typically found empty.

Dated on the construction rather than the style: leather laid over a board and timber carcass, a roll-tooled double-line gilt border, an applied gilt crown on an inset velvet lid panel, a fitted cufflink rack with tie-bar straps under the lid, and a gold country-of-origin stamp reading Box made in Sweden. That combination is the American men’s jewellery presentation case of the post-war decades: c. 1950–1970.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is a box that solves the specific problem of small metal objects on a hard surface.

Cufflinks, collar stays, a spare watch strap, a signet ring, guitar picks, SIM trays, the screws from something you took apart — all of it currently lives in a dish or a drawer where it slides around and gets lost. The slotted rack was engineered for exactly that class of object, and it still works whether or not you own a pair of cufflinks.

It also reads well closed, which is the harder test. Black leather with a fine gold line and a small raised crown is quiet from across a room and rewards a second look up close — the opposite of the polished-brass dresser box, which announces itself and then has nothing further to say.

On a dresser it does the job it was built for. On a desk it takes paper clips, flash drives and business cards and looks considerably better than the acrylic tray it replaces. On a hall table by the door it becomes the place keys and loose change go, which is the single most useful object any entryway can have.

The red interior is the reason to leave it open. Red velvet against black leather is a deliberate contrast and it flatters metal in particular; anything silver or gold set on it gains. Watch collectors use boxes like this for exactly that reason, as a soft-lined tray that will not scratch a case back.

It stacks visually with books and with other dark leather, and it is small enough to move — a shelf, a nightstand, a closet island — until it finds the right place.

A note on care. Keep it dry and out of direct sun. Sunlight is what turns red velvet brown and what dries and cracks old leather, and neither is reversible.

Dust the velvet with a soft brush rather than a cloth, brushing in one direction so the nap lies flat; a vacuum nozzle will pull the pile out of a sixty-year-old lining. Lift the nap where it has flattened by brushing gently against it, not by wetting it.

Do not feed the leather with oil or saddle soap. This is a thin skin laid over board, not a boot; conditioner soaks through, swells the adhesive beneath and lifts the leather at the corners. A dry cloth is enough, and if the surface looks tired a trace of neutral cream on a cloth, worked well away from the gold, is as far as it should go.

Never put solvent near the gilt tooling or the applied crown. Alcohol and household cleaners take gold leaf off in one pass, and it cannot be put back.