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I‘ve been in Boise less than an hour — I haven’t even checked into my room — and already I’m bumping into R. Grey Gallery. It isn’t a total surprise to see an arrangement of art-glass flowers on the hotel lobby counter, bearing the jeweler’s name on a placard. After all, the gallery is just a block away. But it sets the tone for the rest of my stay in Idaho’s capital.
“This is really a small community,” owner Robert Grey Kaylor and his wife, Barbara, will tell me several times while I’m there. On a quick coffee run, he bumps into an acquaintance. That evening, while the Kaylors are showing me the previous location of the store, five streets up from the current spot, two more friends hail them cheerfully and stop to chat.
But there’s also something just plain welcoming, and, well, friendly about the Kaylors and their store.
The gallery exudes pleasant energy, lots of warm browns, golds, and reds, spotted with the remainder of the spectrum here and there. You can’t miss the lit half-staircase, gleaming like a long lantern, leading up to the second level. To the right as you enter, a wall of weathered exposed brick runs the length of the showroom. When the Kaylors bought the space, it was covered in unattractive white paint, which resisted attempts to remove it without damaging the soft masonry. “They said it couldn’t be done, and I said no, it could be done,” Robert tells me. “So I bought a scraper, came down on a Sunday, and in, I don’t know, a half hour, scraped a section about like this down to the original brick.” He stretches his arms out, showing me.
Day laborers were brought in to finish the rest. The point is, though Robert is so low-key and quiet he can seem shy, he has an assured, even assertive, individual sensibility when it comes to his work.
CRAFTING A FUTURE
“One weekend I went to this outdoor flea market,” he says. “I saw this beautiful turquoise bracelet that I couldn’t afford, so I decided to make it myself.”
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He pulled it off — what he’d learned about working with art metals in high school had stuck. “Friends liked it, and they wanted me to make the same bracelets for them, or rings, or whatever. So I started making silver and turquoise jewelry, at the peak of the silver and turquoise jewelry market.”
He did so well, he soon quit his job at the sawmill and entered the student-work program at Northern Arizona University, taking metal classes. When the market for silver and turquoise collapsed, Kaylor moved to Boise, in 1978. The choice was fairly random.
“I picked a place on the map, quite honestly,” he says. He arrived on a Tuesday, had a job at a warehouse by Thursday, and had relocated and started work on Monday.
And it proved serendipitous. The warehouse owner’s father-in-law was Hal Davis, namesake and owner of the town’s Hal Davis Jewelers. Once Kaylor found that out, he applied for an apprenticeship there. He spent the next two years learning the fundamentals of goldsmithing.
Then he struck out on his own, doing trade work on the bench for area retail jewelers. For many years, the trade work funded the original R. Grey Gallery, where he showed off his own custom designs.
“I don’t miss those days!” says Barbara, who met him in 1984, when she dropped off some jewelry for repair. By 1985 they were partners and married by 1986, dropping off jobs around Boise at the end of each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
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That time is long past. Since then, Barbara and Robert have raised three kids — his daughter Lindsay and their twins Nick and Lauren — and R. Grey Gallery has outlived plenty of the jewelers Robert used to do work for, particularly the national chains. But his skills as a craftsman remain an integral part of the business.
Behind the showroom, the store’s small kitchen and restroom, and the Kaylors’ offices lies a tidy two-room work shop full of top-of-the-line equipment. About 20 percent of the gallery’s jewelry inventory is Robert’s own work, all of it hand fabricated.
“So every piece is a little bit different. We don’t have molds of any of it,” he says. “I have all the casting equipment. I just don’t use it. Casting is, it’s too — what would the word be? It’s too common, maybe, to cast a new rubber mold and do the same repetitive design over and over.”
He has tried to stay away from using CAD, too, he says. There’s something not quite as special when an average salesperson can learn the software, design a piece of jewelry, get the customer’s approval, and send it off to be made at a trade shop.
“I think everything’s already becoming so cookie-cutter,” he says. “People are going to want something they can wear that they’re not seeing 20 or 30 of. There’s always going to be a place for one-of-a-kinds.” They’re full of art glass. “They’ll just be walking by, and they’ll see a piece of glass that catches their eye.”
Green came from Portland, OR, by way of Spokane, WA, where she went to school. “I was applying for jobs, and I knew I wanted to go somewhere in the art world, but I wasn’t sure exactly where. I drove out here I think the day after graduation, interviewed, sat in a park by the river, and thought, ‘This is a pretty cool city!'”
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She and the Kaylors work to keep themselves and the gallery’s other employees up to date on the more than 130 artists whose pieces fill the store. “Because of all the different techniques, I would say the learning curve is two years before somebody’s real comfortable and they know a lot of the gemstones being used, or the metals,” Robert says. “It’s a whole process.”
ART OF THE SALE
Of course, the store’s own uniqueness is a function of more than jewelry. Though most of R. Grey’s revenue comes from jewelry sales, much of the floor is taken up by the artwork on sale. Art glass — vases, bowls, the aforementioned flowers — vies for space with wooden boxes, frames, wall hangings, and furniture, much of it vibrantly colored.
The gallery started carrying small art objects at its second location, in about 1989, and expanded its collection to larger pieces when it moved. The Kaylors began selling furniture when they came to the current location in 2007 and finally had enough room.
One benefit is that all the art makes the store a lot more fun to wander through than an ordinary jewelry shop. There is surely no intimidation factor at R. Grey.
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Boise, ID
Robert Grey Kaylor and Barbara Kaylor
1986
2007
$500,000 (not including building)
5,200 square feet
2 full-time, 3 part-time
“You imagine it. We create it!”
ONLINE PRESENCE:
14,561,757
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An outpost of music club the Knitting Factory sits right across the alley behind R. Grey Gallery, and bands frequently mosey over, often befriending amateur musician Robert. He’s hung with Joe Walsh, Keb Mo’, Jackson Browne and Bonnie Raitt, among others. Jimmie Vaughn traded him a guitar for jewelry. And Pat Benatar’s drummer invited the Kaylors to a show in Nevada.
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“Earthworm Farm,” an early effort by Robert’s band the Busy Digits, which he formed with his brother and two friends about 40 years ago. It’s sludgy and trippy and kinda awesome, and might have been composed after polishing off a 12-pack with the rest of the group, the owner confesses. “Sometimes it comes on, and everybody is like, ‘What is that?'” says manager Emily Green.
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“Zat you, Santa Claus?!” — The title of the Louis Armstrong Christmas classic is frequently exclaimed by Robert Kaylor, when he decides to share his Satchmo impression with the gallery crew during the holidays.
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