The Sky’s the Inspiration : Kabana’s designers look to the moon, stars and Southwestern sunsets to create colorful and unusual jewelry.

In the hot plains of New Mexico, four men sit cloistered inside an old adobe tower designing a kind of jewelry never seen before.

With the colorful sunsets of the Southwest to inspire them, they sketch rings with pink tourmaline, purple amethyst and fire opals that match the colors in the sky. They do not worry whether the stones exist that will fit their designs. They leave that to the 200 or so jewelers who toil in the 150-year-old adobe church below.

At Kabana, a jewelry manufacturer in Albuquerque, the designers don’t let the material inhibit their creativity. That’s one reason they work in an ivory tower with murals of the moon and stars on the walls of their studio. Here, there are no limits.

“They’re designers, not jewelers. They’re not limited by conventional jewelry thought,” says Ron Cohan, owner of Zia Jewelry Co. in San Juan Capistrano. “They never touch the stones or the metal.”

Cohan will host a large show of Kabana jewelry at his store from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Oct. 18, 19 and 20. It’s a chance to see jewelry that’s on the cutting edge, he says.

When Cohan first saw Kabana’s colorful creations at a jewelry show, he wanted only one thing: more. Kabana’s collection is in such demand that Cohan waits months for new pieces to come in. Often his stock dwindles down to a couple of dozen pieces.

Yet Cohan has been known to be tenacious when he finds a jewelry maker he admires.

“My purpose is to find unusual and artistic things at the very edge of fashion,” he says.

He visited Kabana’s old Indian church that has been converted into the company’s headquarters and met the designers--Paul Menke, who works on a computer with three-dimensional color graphics capability, Tony Armijo, Jim Griffin and Johnorman Roberts. He saw how the four work.

“It’s like being in outer space,” he says. “They’re up there with their colored pencils and they’re drawing. It’s not up to them to make it practical. They don’t worry if a design’s too hard to do or if nobody’s tried it.”

The jewelers, in turn, were so impressed with his enthusiasm for their product that they agreed to a rare show of their entire collection--about 1,000 pieces.

Everything about Kabana jewelry is unconventional, from the way it is made to the way it looks.

Unlike most jewelry, Kabana’s creations are made without prongs. Instead, the gems are inlaid in the metal or they are channel-set between two borders of gold so that they appear to be floating in the setting.

“Here a piece of jewelry is made around the stone; the stone’s not popped into a setting,” Cohan says.

One striking ring has blue-green fire opals cut into asymmetrical shapes and inlaid on a band of gold, much like tiles on a floor, with 32 pave diamonds set in between the opals.

The designs also call for unlikely combinations of gemstones. Faceted stones in unusual shapes often mingle with stones that have been polished smooth. Thus, a pair of marquis-shaped earrings has faceted purple amethysts inlaid with smooth purple sugalite and white mother-of-pearl.

Desert colors are a strong influence.

“You know the great sunsets we’ve been having lately? They have those all of the time in the Southwest,” Cohan says.

Their pieces have striking combinations of color. One Art Deco-style ring features a blue-green fire opal cut into a fan shape and inlaid in gold, juxtaposed with a triangular pink tourmaline with a rounded edge, a chrome green tourmaline, a purple tanzanite and a row of five channel-set diamonds. Other designs have abstract mosaics or prisms of multicolored gems.

Strong color is a growing trend in jewelry, Cohan says.

“Purple and green used to be a rare combination in jewelry. Now it’s common,” he says. The Kabana designers “are going beyond that and adding red stones and diamonds to the purple and green. They’re really going overboard.”

The designers can stretch the limits of their craft thanks to a team of stonecutters and carvers who try to make their sketches come to life.

“Most jewelers work with pre-cut stones. That’s why jewelry is so boring,” Cohan says. The Kabana jewelers “cut the stones themselves to make something unusual.”

Thus, they can design a ring with a row of purple amethyst cut into intersecting triangles, and the stones will be found and cut to match their vision.

Kabana was founded in 1973 by Stavros Eleftheriou, who had come to America the year before from the Greek island of Mykonos with just $60 in his pocket, according to Stephen Dann, vice president of sales and marketing. Inspired by the talents of American Indians in making silver and turquoise jewelry, he decided to translate those skills into contemporary designs using gold and precious gems.

He assembled a design team and was soon so successful he moved from a small shop to the Indian church in 1975. The church’s baptismal tank is somewhere in Kabana’s accounting department.

“It’s no longer used,” Dann jokes.

Pieces from Kabana’s collection start at $400; a showpiece ring set with precious gems, for example, sells for about $2,000 to $4,000. Cohan credits Kabana’s strong colors and unusual design.

“People are bored to death wearing diamonds and gold bands. All it says is, ‘This cost a lot of money,’ ” Cohan says. “These are things most people haven’t seen yet.”