Behind the cash register at Monk Estate hangs a black-and-white photograph of Lazuli Whitt’s mother, Barbara. The image was taken by her father, Michael, in the early ‘60s, and it shows Barbara dressed in a headscarf and Ray Bans, carrying a bamboo-handled bag as she shops in the south of France.
“Her style was classic and simple,” Lazuli said. “It always had a flare, there was an ease about it. Never pretentious.”
Barbara died in 2017, before Monk Estate opened; otherwise, “She would have been here helping me,” Lazuli said.
It was Barbara who introduced her daughter to a lifelong love of antique jewelry. She would pick her up after summer camps in New Mexico and they’d drive through the Southwest, stopping at trading posts and estate sales. She bought Lazuli her first Victorian pieces.
Now, after working for 20 years as a post-conviction lawyer, Lazuli is selling Victorian-era jewelry and other treasures she’s collected in her travels in her new Point Reyes Station shop.
Monk Estate opened in December 2020 in the Cheda Building, sharing its location with the new Blunk Space gallery. It offers handmade Moroccan clothing, linens brought in from Italy, Japanese incense and a perfume line from Oaxaca. There is Oaxacan glassware made by Xaquixe Salime and soda-fired stoneware ceramics made by Lazuli’s husband, Whitman Shenk. Lazuli works with local and international makers and designers, 75 percent of whom are women, she said.
“Most of the same things I’ve started with here are things in my own home,” she said. “They’re all items I have a personal relationship with.”
The Agnes Baddoo leather handbags she sells are the same she carried around for years, and almost every art book, travelogue and cookbook—from “Georgia O’Keeffe and Her Houses: Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu” to Patience Gray’s book “Honey from a Weed”—is on her bookshelf at home. The French scarves are from a tiny brand she discovered on a trip, and the Italian paper is the stationery she always uses.
But her real love is antique jewelry. “I fell in love with the storytelling aspect of it,” she said. “It’s all one-of-a-kind and you’re never going to see it again.”
Lazuli travels to London three or four times a year to collect pieces from the same group of mostly women sellers. She herself wears a French gold coin on a chain around her neck. “Jewelry is often a comforting presence,” she said. “It really is about the way it feels. The weight of it, the patina, its energy. You’re just drawn to certain things.”
The tactile element to choosing jewelry made the pandemic particularly difficult, and for the past two years she largely bought through pictures. But her customers have craved shopping in the flesh.
Isabelle Smith, a Los Angeles resident, wears an Italian rose gold insignia ring from Monk Estate.
“It’s special when these stores open,” she said. “We’re able to touch and feel the items. Lazuli’s shop is not overwhelming for people to enjoy, even if they’re not purchasing anything.”
Brook Lane, a customer from Inverness, said Lazuli sources from incredible producers: “She has a strong and beautiful combination of things. She ties all these different time frames and places together and it feels really seamless and compelling.”
Ms. Lane bought gold Taurus and Aries charms from Monk Estate for her and her best friend, and they wear them all the time. “Retail can be tough with a lot of people with a lot of needs,” she said. “Lazuli makes time for people. It’s a unique investment in her clients and people who stop in her store.”
The challenges of running a shop are new to her, yet Lazuli said she’s trying not to overthink it. “I don’t worry too much about how things are supposed to be done, and it’s been fun to not have so many rules,” she said. “I find what I gravitate toward.”
In May, after returning from a trip to Oaxaca, she hosted a pop-up at her shop. Friends and community members gathered, perused her Mexican finds and sipped mescal.
“I’m a hostess at heart,” she said. “I love creating space, inviting people into my world. It’s a way of taking care of them, making sure they’re comfortable with what they’re eating, drinking, with what they’re seeing. It’s creating atmosphere. It’s the music, the way the room smells. It’s meant to be a moment.”
She adds that there’s a curious rhythm to retail that she doesn’t quite understand yet. It comes in waves, she said.
“As soon as somebody shows interest in something, it’s magnetic,” she said. “They don’t even have to be in the same space together: Someone can come in and pine over something, not purchase it and then someone else will come in totally randomly and buy it. It’s fascinating.”
Lazuli grew up in Inverness and her father worked as a doctor across the street from where her shop is now. She remembers the shopkeepers downtown knowing her by name. They were people she could count on.
“It was a true sense of community,” she said. “I wanted to be part of the fabric of Point Reyes like the shopowners of my childhood.”
Monk Estate is open from noon to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday at 11101 Highway 1, Suite 105, next to Point Reyes Jeweler. You can see Lazuli’s jewelry at www.monkestate.com.