Founded by longtime collaborators Lauren Lubell and Patrick Keville, Toledo is a Los Angeles–based jewelry label that approaches adornment through the lens of industrial design.
The two designers have known each other for over fifteen years, first meeting at art school in Ohio before developing parallel careers in product and furniture design. Their eventual shift toward jewelry was not a departure, but rather a continuation—an opportunity to apply object-based thinking at a more intimate, bodily scale.
Toledo operates as a kind of alternate timeline for American design—one in which Art Deco and streamlining were never fully displaced by postwar modernism, but instead continued to evolve. In this framework, ornament is not rejected, but refined; not applied, but integrated into structure.
Toledo’s work exists somewhere between sculpture and utility. Rings, necklaces, and bracelets are conceived less as decorative accessories and more as engineered forms—structures that sit on the body, responding to it, rather than simply embellishing it. This perspective is rooted in their shared background. Before founding Toledo, both designers worked across disciplines including lighting and furniture, where constraint, material logic, and problem-solving are fundamental. Jewelry, in their view, offered a rare balance: a medium with clear physical limitations, yet one that allows for a high degree of formal freedom.
Rather than centering traditional markers of value, Toledo prioritizes form. Stones—often hematite, ruby, or carnelian—are used sparingly, functioning as accents rather than focal points. Their preference for smooth, integrated settings over prong-based construction creates a continuous surface, emphasizing reflection, curvature, and tactility.
In many cases, the presence of a “stone” is even illusory. Certain pieces rely purely on light and reflection to simulate depth or material, challenging the viewer’s perception of what is real and what is constructed. This play between illusion and object is a defining element of the brand.
Equally important is touch. Toledo’s jewelry often incorporates subtle kinetic or tactile qualities—forms that invite interaction, that feel considered in the hand as much as they appear visually. The experience of wearing becomes inseparable from the object itself.
The design process reflects this sensibility. Ideas move fluidly between the two designers, often beginning as a sketch or digital model before being reshaped through continuous iteration. It is not uncommon for dozens of unsuccessful variations to precede a final piece—an approach inherited directly from industrial design practice.
Material choice follows a similarly deliberate logic. While Toledo uses high-quality natural stones, it rejects the hierarchy typically associated with fine jewelry—where value is determined by rarity alone. Stones are not treated as the center of the piece, but as elements within a larger formal system, chosen for how they integrate with the object as a whole.
This position reflects a broader interest in the relationship between industrial production and beauty.
This approach extends to the use of vintage marbles sourced from mid-20th century American manufacturing. Produced in a finite historical window, these objects now exist as a closed resource—no longer made, only recovered. Their scarcity is not geological, but cultural.
They emerge from a period in which industrial production, everyday play, and material culture were unusually aligned—when factory-made objects were not abstract commodities, but things directly handled, exchanged, and unapologetically beautiful. Unlike traditional gemstones, whose value is tied to natural formation, these marbles carry a different kind of rarity. Their significance is not extracted from the ground, but accumulated through contact, time, and memory.
The result is a kind of material déjà vu—objects that feel familiar on contact, but difficult to place. Not futuristic, not nostalgic, but displaced. As if they were recovered from a parallel industrial history in which ornament and machinery were never separated.
At the same time, Toledo is shaped by displacement. Now based in Los Angeles, the designers approach Americana from a distance, filtered through both memory and reinterpretation. They are particularly interested in how American culture is reimagined abroad—especially in Japan and Italy—where designers often produce versions of Americana that feel heightened, exaggerated, or unexpectedly precise.
In Italy, this dynamic is exemplified by cars like the Iso Grifo—an American V8 reinterpreted through Italian coachbuilding. The result is not imitation, but translation: something simultaneously more refined and more extreme than its source.