Turquoise Home Design: A Colour That Never Left the Room

Long before anyone drew up a paint chart, Persian potters had already worked out how to make the colour Turqoise: fire copper into a glaze and the result is the same blue-green that gave the stone its old Persian name, firuzeh, meaning victory — mined from the hills at Nishapur since the fifth millennium BC and still coming out of the same ground today.

That glaze ended up tiled across shrine domes the length of Iran, among them the twin minarets and cupola that Shah Abbas rebuilt at Mahan in 1601, known to Persian writers as taram-e firouze: the turquoise dome, a stand-in for the sky itself.

Cross into Arabia and the colour turns up again, this time set in silver rather than fired into clay: Bedouin and Omani jewellers paired turquoise with coral in pendants and anklets, worn less to show off than to ward something off, on the old belief that a blue-green stone kept harm at arm's length. Neither tradition owes the other much. They simply arrived at the same shade by different roads, which is usually a fair sign a colour is onto something — and a shade with that sort of pedigree rarely stays put in a shrine or a jewellery box for long. Sooner or later it comes indoors, onto a wall or into a tile, and makes itself quite at home there too.

 

Steady as She Goes: Turquoise in the English Country House

The English have always preferred a colour that keeps itself to itself, and turquoise, used properly, follows suit. An eighteenth-century house in Dorset, on England's south-western coast, was featured this year in Sotheby's International Realty's design series, Color Chart. Its indoor pool is painted a deep, almost brooding teal rather than a brighter aqua — a choice that suits a period house, and one that looks just as good on a grey Dorset afternoon as it does in sunshine.

Further east, at Winslow House on St George's Hill in Weybridge, listed with United Kingdom Sotheby's International Realty, the colour arrives by a different route entirely: an indoor pool sits beneath a sky lantern, so the water borrows its blue-green from whatever light happens to be passing overhead rather than from a paint tin at all.

Ripley Grange, the Grade II* estate at Debden Green, also on the market with United Kingdom Sotheby's International Realty, puts its leisure wing entirely below ground: a fifty-three-foot pool room with its own jacuzzi and lounger area, reached separately from the drawing room and the rest of the house's Elizabethan-style reception rooms, with a sauna, steam room and treatment room arranged around it. The colour is confined to one wing of a forty-acre estate rather than spread through it.

 

Out in the Open: Turquoise Under a Different Sky

Cross into the Gulf, a nine-bedroom mansion currently taking shape in Emerald Hills, within Dubai Hills Estate and offered through Dubai Sotheby's International Realty, where a Havana pool runs past a fire pit and a swim-up bar in full view of the terrace, framed by floor-to-ceiling glass walls that open the ground floor onto the garden and, beyond it, the golf course and the Burj Khalifa skyline.

One floor down sits a Moroccan steam bath and a five-car basement garage; one floor up, a family room with its own pantry — the pool is simply the most visible room in a house built to be seen from every level. The colour owes less to a design brief than to geography: put that much glass and water under Gulf light, and you land on roughly the same blue-green that silversmiths in Nizwa and Rustaq once set into anklets and kohl containers, reaching for turquoise for much the same reason the light does now.

 

Further Afield

The colour keeps similar company wherever else Sotheby's International Realty happens to be selling it. A villa on Antigua's Nonsuch Bay is simply named Villa Turquoise after the water it overlooks; a renovated house in Islamorada, Florida, wears a pale turquoise exterior indoors and out; and on the Greek island of Meganisi, a villa with Greece Sotheby's International Realty sets turquoise bathrooms against bare rock.

 

Set Rather Than Tiled: Turquoise on the Auction Block

Set rather than tiled, the stone leads a grander life of its own, and Sotheby's saleroom sees no shortage of it. Cartier worked turquoise into an enamelled powder compact in the 1920s and, later still, carved it into one of a trio of ladybird dress clips, spotted with diamonds and black enamel; Boucheron paired it with sapphires in a demi-parure in the 1960s, Seaman Schepps set it beside shell and coral in a brooch of similar vintage, and a turquoise-and-diamond necklace under the workshop name Monture Faraone has passed through Sotheby's London Fine Jewels sales at an estimate of some £20,000 to 30,000.

In May 2024, a turquoise-and-amethyst necklace by the French jeweller René Boivin, its beads modelled as fronds of seaweed and designed in 1962, went under the hammer in Geneva as part of a single-owner sale titled Iconic Jewels: Her Sense of Style — proof, if any were needed, that a sixty-year-old necklace can hold its own beside grander stones in the same room without raising its voice. Sotheby's 2026 High Jewelry sale carries the line forward with a Van Cleef & Arpels bracelet pairing turquoise with gold and lapis lazuli, and a Bulgari bib necklace of turquoise cabochons and diamonds has been given an estimate of $150,000 to $200,000 in a recent Signed Jewels sale. Draw a line from a Persian mine, through an Omani silversmith and an English swimming pool, to a Geneva saleroom, and it turns out to be remarkably short. Turquoise, it seems, was never really lost. It simply stepped out for a while.