Now tourists can remember a Plaza hotel stay with more than just mini shampoo bottles and extra room keys.
This month, the iconic Manhattan property will start selling jewelry crafted from the massive Baccarat-crystal chandeliers that once hung gloriously around the hotel.
“You are technically owning a piece of the Plaza and getting to wear it,” says the jewelry’s designer, Heather Morra.
The 24 chandeliers, worth $2,500 to $4,000 each, hung over the heads of countless celebrity guests — including The Beatles, who visited the hotel in 1964, just days before their American debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — for decades. In 2005, the grand lighting fixtures were taken down as part of a massive 3-year renovation and packed away.
“They were boxed and literally sitting in storage,” says Kristin Franzese, executive vice president of retail at the hotel. “I didn’t know what to do with them.”
In the past, the Plaza had sold objects, such as doorknobs, to hotel guests who expressed interest, but Franzese and her retail team wanted to be more creative.
In 2014, they showed the dusty chandeliers to Morra, a New York-based jewelry designer whose work was already on sale at the Plaza’s gift shop.
She immediately saw the potential to use pieces of the luxe lighting fixtures — each of which are strung with hundreds of crystals in various shapes and sizes — to create unique accessories.
“It’s really special, magical,” Morra says of the eight jewelry designs, called the Legacy Collection, that she created.
Judging by the style and wear on the crystals, Morra estimates that the chandeliers date back to the 1920s or 30s. While all Baccarat crystals are “exquisite,” she says the history of these particular ones make them especially so.
“There is some age to [them] that make [them] really fun [and] beautiful,” says Morra, who grew up reading the Eloise books and dreamed of running through the Plaza as a child.
The Plaza also has other treasures, like doorplates, that it hopes to recycle into unique jewelry.
“If we put our minds to it, we can come up with some interesting things,” Franzese says.
And there are plenty more chandeliers to make use of. Just six of the 24 lighting fixtures were used to make the Legacy Collection, which will be sold in the hotel gift shop. A bridal bauble collection is in the works for this fall.
“We could probably make jewelry for the next 10 years,” says Franzese. “We literally have a bucket filled to the top [with crystals].”
