HANDMADE IN NEW YORK
Since 2010, natural gemstones have been the starting point of every piece I make. They are ethically sourced and personally curated from Spain, where I spent five years living close to Antoni Gaudí's work. It was never the buildings themselves that changed how I design — it was his models.
To work out the structure of the Sagrada Família and the crypt at Colònia Güell, Gaudí hung chains from a board and let gravity pull each one into its own natural curve, then flipped the result upside down. The shape a chain finds on its own, inverted, becomes the strongest possible arch — no strut, no beam, nothing forced.
That's the whole idea behind the cage. I don't design a setting and go looking for a stone to fit it. The stone sets the terms. The chain just listens.
The Cage
Every piece starts the same way — not with a plan, but with the stone itself. I study its shape, its weight, the way light moves across it, and let the chain respond to what's already there. Nothing is forced into a mold or cut to a template — the chain drapes and wraps, link by link, around the stone's own natural form, the same way Gaudí let a hanging chain find its own curve. The cage that results doesn't hide the stone. It reveals it — every facet, every irregular edge, visible through the weave, exactly as the earth made it.
The Engineering
Gaudí's hanging models weren't decoration. They were the engineering. A chain left to hang under its own weight settles into a catenary curve — the most structurally efficient shape there is, strong enough when inverted to carry a cathedral's weight without a single beam. That's not a metaphor for what happens on the bench. It's the same physics. Every MHART cage is chain doing structural work, not decoration — the thing actually holding the stone, not just wrapped around it.
You can see the stone through every opening in the weave. The cage is a frame, not a wall — the stone's energy still comes through, and the chain is just the structure that lets you wear it. Nothing here is decoration. It's the structure holding a stone the earth already finished.
Every design reflects my obsessive attention to detail and my instinct to create something imperfect, intentional, and impossible to replicate. Nothing here is mass-produced — every cage is shaped and assembled by one set of hands, start to finish, which is also why no two pieces are ever exactly alike, and each one is built strong enough to protect its stone for a lifetime.
-Michael M🖤
