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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Jeweler draws on past to make cut


Fifth-generation jeweler Naim Tunca  owns Lorraine Fine Jewelry, 828 W. Garland Ave.  Tunca designs and creates his own pieces. 
 (Holly Pickett / The Spokesman-Review)
Bert Caldwell The Spokesman-Review

Naim Tunca pours the best cup of coffee in the Garland District. And he sells diamonds, too.

That may be Garland Avenue outside, but the glitter inside Lorraine Fine Jewelry is more Wilshire Boulevard, the Santa Monica address where Tunca sold his shimmering concoctions of precious metals and stone for two decades.

Before Santa Monica it was Istanbul, Turkey, where Tunca started working in the family jewelry business at age 8. A photo in his shop shows Tunca and an older brother side by side at a chest-high workbench.

Of six children, only Naim chose to follow four generations of Tuncas into the business.

He also followed a cousin to Santa Monica in 1978. But no sooner had the pair signed a lease to set up their own shop when the cousin walked away. Suddenly solo, Tunca spoke so little English that, when asked a price by customers, he had to write the amount on a piece of paper.

The price must have been right.

For most of the next 21 years, Tunca sold his custom-made creations, as well as those of other Turks who had moved to the Los Angeles area. He built an exclusive clientele. Another photo shows a 25-year-old Tunca looking at gems with Liberace, who bought three pieces from him over the years.

But he was also robbed at gunpoint 1987, and he began searching for a new home. During a 1989 lunch with family friends living in Coeur d’Alene, he noticed a for-sale-by-owner sign on a building at 412 Sherman Ave. He bought it the following day, fixed it up and opened a shop.

Seven months and a divorce later, he retreated to Santa Monica. Although his California customers welcomed him back, he says, “I left my heart in Coeur d’Alene.”

In December 1999, remarried to Lorraine, he came back to the Inland Northwest. Tunca said he was tired of days as long as 20 hours and the months away from his children, who stayed with their mother in Idaho. He moved to Spokane and began wholesaling jewelry to a couple of independent jewelers in the area.

“I have connections that go back 200 years,” he says.

Tunca, 52, also bought four foreclosed homes to use as rentals. That did not work out. Tunca says tenants took advantage of his easy nature. “I sold all of them,” he says.

But he was not content. Her workaholic husband, Lorraine says, “could not stay away from making jewelry.”

In 2002, he opened Lorraine Fine Jewelry in a building as plain on the outside as it is dazzling inside. Tunca says he located on Garland because he did not expect drive-by trade to represent much of his clientele. Although Lorraine Fine Jewelry sells a few items for less than $1,000, price tags upward of $3,000 – sometimes way upward – are more common. “We’re into very high end,” Tunca says.

There’s a 29-carat opal pendant, for one spectacular example. And a ring featuring a triangle-shaped orange sapphire embedded in white and blue diamonds. Other pieces showcase burgundy spinel. Or violet tanzanite. Or alexandrite, whose color changes with the light.

The stones are nature’s work. Most of the settings are Tunca’s, although some were designed by B. Kelly Dullanty, who moved into the shop last fall.

“Naim’s reputation, and the merchandise, that’s what attracted me here,” says Dullanty, who has more than 20 years in the jewelry business.

All Tunca’s pieces are distinguished by lace-like “gallery” beneath the stones. Although out of sight, the work would make for a thing of beauty if the ring was worn inside out.

Tunca says he has customers from New York to Florida to California to Montana, some as a result of his years in California, some through contacts with other jewelers who know who has the stone or piece a customer wants.

But those distant customers do not have the pleasure of a demitasse-sized Turkish coffee. Sometimes Tunca might offer a glass of wine or a sip of his prize scotch.

“We try to have fun,” he says.