BBC Television Centre, 2 May 1990. “Who would spend seven million pounds on an egg?” The question fills the TV studio. At home, six million viewers watch as chat show host Terry Wogan smiles knowingly, his brown eyes sparkling. “Seven million pounds,” he repeats in his Irish accent. “And you can’t even eat it.”
The audience laughs. A heckler shouts that he’d offer a fiver for it. The band starts to play. At the back of the studio, two burly bodyguards stand in silhouette. The egg’s diamond-studded shell glitters under the bright lights.
“It was no silly goose that laid this, the world’s biggest golden egg.” Wogan gestures toward the giant jewelled object, his voice brimming with pantomime-style excitement. “And let’s welcome the man who made it,” he says smoothly. “Paul Kutchinsky.”
My father strolls out, beaming from ear to ear. His shiny new loafers glide across the studio floor, and he reaches out to steady himself on Terry Wogan’s arm. With his wild hair, slender build, and gold-rimmed glasses, he looks a bit like a mad professor.
The camera zooms in on the egg atop its golden pedestal. At two feet tall, it’s the size of a small child. Its surface shimmers with thousands of pink diamonds, casting shadows across the studio floor. The heavy gold shell is open to reveal the first of its surprises: a glittering miniature library topped by a tiny diamond clock.
For Paul, the past few days have been a whirlwind, and the enormity of what’s happening is only just sinking in. His lifelong ambition is being realised—but alongside the elation, he feels sharp pangs of dread.
The egg is everywhere. On display in a museum. Splashed across the pages of national newspapers. Starring on breakfast TV. The press are comparing Paul to the legendary Carl Fabergé, whose ornate jewelled eggs won him the patronage of Russia’s last tsars in the late 19th century. Just that morning, a letter had arrived from Guinness World Records confirming that Kutchinsky’s egg was the world’s largest jewelled egg.
The cameras are rolling, and Wogan is standing over the egg, fiddling with its controls. “How do I turn this thing on?” My father leaps up, flicks a switch, and smiles proudly as the egg spins seductively. The jewelled library is replaced by a portrait gallery filled with exquisite blue enamel frames, each ringed with ribbons of diamonds.
“Look at that,” Wogan marvels—the faintest hint of sarcasm in his voice—“going round in all its sparkling glory.”
When I was growing up, my mother used to call the egg “your father’s ego,” while to the rest of the world it was known as the Argyle Library Egg by Kutchinsky. I felt a mix of pride and bafflement toward my father’s creation. I was thrilled to take its Guinness World Records certificate to school to show my friends, but I didn’t understand why anyone would want an egg that big if it wasn’t made of chocolate.
But after the egg, life was never the same. It came to bear responsibility for the loss of our century-old business, the collapse of my parents’ marriage, and my father’s untimely death. After the family firm was sold, the egg was seized by creditors and locked away. It vanished, but its shadow lingered. My mother raged against it as if it were human—a Maleficent-like villain that stole her livelihood and husband, and robbed her children of a father. I was meant to hate it, too. But I couldn’t. Just like I couldn’t hate Dad when he left. Instead, the idea that this shrine to his eccentric, audacious ambition was out there somewhere gnawed away at me.
I picture him rifling through his books for inspiration, making endless calculations about costs and measurements.
In the hunt for the egg, I would spend money I didn’t have on private detectives, consult countless experts, and fire off emotional emails to jewellers and diamond firms around the world. I would go…There were times when I thought it was lost forever and grieved that my dad’s story would never be told. But something inside me refused to give up. I had to find this mysterious, destructive object—one of the most valuable artworks ever made in Britain—and understand what drove my father to risk everything: his livelihood, his marriage, and his family, just to create it.
My dad, Paul, loved making things. He was a dreamer with the drive of a top salesman, but he didn’t have a ruthless streak. As he grew up and joined the family jewelry business, he couldn’t stop thinking about Carl Fabergé. He felt drawn to the Russian master almost like a romantic obsession, wanting to become part of the world he admired. His vision for the House of Kutchinsky was to create jeweled artworks in the style of Fabergé for the wealthy Middle Eastern market.
But shifting away from traditional jewelry was risky. Unique pieces could bring in huge sums, but they took months to make and required expensive materials. “There was big money to be made, but you could lose your shirt on it,” one craftsman told me. While Paul longed for the creative challenge of turning everyday objects into art, his father, Jo, was hesitant to support the idea. Tensions rose, and once, a physical fight broke out on the shop floor. As Paul and Jo fought, with suited limbs flailing, the staff watched in horror. The doorman eventually pulled them apart, but more than just egos were bruised that day.
Dad first told me about his plan to build the world’s largest jeweled egg while we were sitting in the cab of a small digger. I was nine, and part of our garden was being torn up to make room for a tennis court. The yellow excavator had been left on the lawn, and I’d convinced Dad to lift me into the cab. He climbed up beside me and joked about the headlines if we accidentally went on a rampage through the neighborhood. “Kutchinsky and Daughter Cause Chaos in Richmond Park,” he said with a laugh. Then, lowering his voice, he asked if I wanted to know a secret. “I’m going to make a giant golden egg,” he whispered, his eyes wide. “The biggest in the world. Bigger than Fabergé’s.”
I was captivated and bombarded him with questions. How big would it be? How many diamonds would it have? “It will be nearly as tall and beautiful as you, with thousands of pink diamonds,” he said. I made a face—I didn’t like pink and prided myself on being a tomboy. He stuck his tongue out at me. “Grumpy Cece,” he teased. “These diamonds are prettier than any you’ve ever seen, I promise.”
I must have looked skeptical because he continued in that overly cheerful tone adults use when they’re trying to convince you everything is fine. “Your mother thinks I’m crazy, too, but I’ve told her this will make our fortune. After the egg sells, you can have anything you want.”
“Anything? Even a puppy?”
“Even a puppy,” he promised. Just then, we heard Mom calling us—Sunday lunch was ready. “Remember to keep the egg a secret,” he said. “Just for now.”
The first sketch of Kutchinsky’s egg was drawn almost by accident in the lead-up to Easter 1989. Paul had hired a young designer named Cheryl Prewitt as part of his effort to bring more women into the business. She was increasingly tasked with designing everything from traditional jewelry to a set of gold figurines studded with precious stones, depicting characters from The Simpsons, which had been commissioned as a gift for the Sultan of Brunei’s children.
During a rare free moment, she began sketching an egg with a jeweled library inside, inspired by a bookcase in her parents’ home. Suddenly, Paul appeared behind her. At first, all she heard was a long, drawn-out “Hmm…” Then he snatched the drawing from her sketchbook and shuffled back to his office in his Gucci loafers.”We’ll make that, Cheryl,” he called over his shoulder, his eyes gleaming.
I imagine him in his office, carefully studying her sketch, flipping through his books for ideas, and constantly calculating costs and measurements. The design went back and forth between them, growing more and more elaborate until it became, as Cheryl put it, “a monster.” As Paul became more obsessed with the egg, my mother Brenda grew increasingly uneasy. Whenever he had too much wine at dinner, he would start boasting about becoming the next Carl Fabergé. Afterwards, she would roll her eyes and remind him in her soft Scottish accent that he had a business to run and a family to support, before he got carried away with creating giant golden eggs.
Paul proudly kept his copy of the contract with the Argyle Diamond Mine in Western Australia. It stated: “The parties have agreed to manufacture and design a Library Egg approximately 63cm tall, made from 17,650 grams of 18-carat gold and 700 carats (140 grams) of diamonds.”
Argyle agreed to pay Kutchinsky A$870,000 (about £444,000 in 1989) to cover half the material and manufacturing costs, along with supplying over A$2 million worth of mostly pink diamonds. The sale price was set at “no less than $5 million,” with profits to be split 60/40 in Argyle’s favor if a buyer was found. Paul assured them that finding a buyer would be the easy part. He had a knack for sales, especially in the Middle East. If the Sultan of Brunei wasn’t interested, there was always Donald Trump, the American multimillionaire known for his love of golden trinkets. For now, his focus was entirely on “making the bloody thing.”
At first, Paul felt a connection with the goldsmith he hired to help create the egg. Leo de Vroomen was talented, ambitious, and shared Paul’s desire to break the rules. For a while, they worked well together. But their partnership began to fray when the egg’s supposedly cutting-edge electronics kept malfunctioning. As costs soared, Paul’s frustration turned to anger.
The breaking point came when De Vroomen submitted an invoice for more than double his original estimate and then refused to release the egg for repairs. With the future of Project Egg in jeopardy, Paul took matters into his own hands. With help from a friend who was a policeman, he pulled off a daring heist. At dawn, he slipped into De Vroomen’s workshop, hid the egg in a Harrods bag, and sped away through London’s empty streets in a Peugeot 505 police car.
Mum says the £7 million price tag was something Dad threw out to stir up media interest. He expected to get less but was testing his luck. Perhaps Dad thought this was the best way to secure a sale, or maybe it showed his growing desperation as financial pressures mounted. Like a poker player with his last chips, he steeled himself and went all in.
By the spring of 1990, Kutchinsky’s egg was finished. There was one last moment of panic when Dad realized the photo frames in the portrait gallery were still empty. The original plan was to hire a firm specializing in hand-painted miniatures, but the cost of the motors in the bottom half of the egg’s shell—supplied by a Ministry of Defense provider on the condition that Kutchinsky’s workshop manager, Gerald Earl, sign the Official Secrets Act—forced him to abandon this final flourish. Instead, he and David O’Connor, the head of sales, cut out pictures of historical figures in wigs from my school textbooks and images from glossy magazines like Tatler to fill the spaces.
Neither of my parents were…During the egg’s creation, my parents were rarely home. If they weren’t attending charity events, they were dining with clients, or my father was playing tennis—often his excuse to see Anna, a sales assistant for a Hatton Garden associate, with whom he was having an affair. I had started acting out in class so much that my parents were called in to meet with my headteacher after I caused a disruption with some friends.
“Has anything changed at home recently?” the headteacher asked during the meeting. I stared at the floor. My mother shot an angry look at my father. No one mentioned the egg.
On the drive home, I sat in the back of the car and tried to tune out their arguing, but bits and pieces still reached me. My father kept repeating his promises: to buy my mother a new car, take us all on a big family holiday, add a swimming pool to the house. Our lives could finally start again. After the egg.
I first saw Kutchinsky’s egg at the exhibition launch at the V&A. We arrived as it was being placed into a display case in the center of the grand room, with its red-tiled floor and walls lined with gilt-framed pictures. Gerald was there, polishing the shell and testing the electronics. The case doors weren’t locked yet, and with my parents deep in conversation with a museum official, I seized my chance. Creeping up behind Gerald, I stood on tiptoe and reached out to touch the egg’s cool, hard surface.
My sister, Katrina, crossed the room and was about to do the same when a security guard stepped in. I grabbed her hand and rushed out, pushing through the crowd gathering in the foyer. I could hear my father cursing in the distance. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t care. Finally, I had touched the egg.
After the exhibition, the egg embarked on a world tour, like a pop star enjoying a meteoric rise. The first stop was Tokyo, where the pink diamond market was booming. The city’s most prestigious department store, Mitsukoshi—where Kutchinsky had a small boutique—would showcase the egg, putting it on the radar of Japan’s newly minted billionaire class.
Tokyo followed the pattern of the egg’s previous appearances in Basel, Switzerland, and a private chateau outside Hamburg: rapturous headlines, a stream of superlatives from onlookers, but no sign of a sale. The next stop was New York City, where the egg would make its U.S. debut at Christie’s prestigious auction house. This time, Brenda joined Paul. He had been distant lately, but she attributed it to stress and lack of family time. “He was obviously having his affair then,” my mother now recalls. “I could feel he was disengaged, but I just tried to brush it off.”
They flew on Concorde, sharing the supersonic flight with the former Prince Andrew and his then-wife, Sarah Ferguson. As the jet steadied after takeoff, they toasted Paul’s success. Lurking behind them, strapped in alongside its bodyguards, the egg served as a constant reminder that this wasn’t a holiday. (It was far too precious to go in the hold, so my father’s creation had its own seat, booked under the name Mr. Egg.)
For four packed days, they trailed the egg around the city, doing interviews with everyone from The New Yorker to Brides magazine and NBC’s Today Show. The trip’s climax was the “Ultimate Event”—a glittering cocktail reception at Christie’s, offering the elite a glimpse of the “Ultimate Masterpiece.” “We did everything we could to find a buyer,” my mother said. “Short of hawking it in the street and walking up and down Broadway with a sign saying ‘Egg for sale.'”
By the final day, it was clear that despite his love of gold bling, Manhattan local Donald Trump wasn’t going to buy the egg. Malcolm Forbes, the famous Fabergé collector, had also been on my father’s list until his sudden death earlier that year. The mood on the three-and-a-half-hour Concorde flight back was subdued.
That summer…The summer of 1990 stands out in my memory as the point when our family began to unravel. We spent the start of the school holidays in Marbella, southern Spain, while Dad stayed in London. I could sense Mum felt aggrieved, left alone to look after three young children. “Bloody egg,” she would mutter under her breath when she thought we weren’t listening. At night, we feasted on pizza and ice cream, trying to gloss over Dad’s absence.
That was the year Saddam Hussein ruined my birthday. After I pleaded with Dad to fly out and celebrate my turning eleven, he eventually gave in. He arrived the day before but seemed distracted and irritable. News was breaking that Iraq’s president had sent his forces to invade neighboring Kuwait. The UN immediately condemned the invasion, and an allied coalition was formed to drive Saddam out.
Dad spent most of my birthday glowering on the sofa, muttering profanities. The implications for the House of Kutchinsky were clear: if war broke out, the Middle East’s heads of state would be too busy protecting their oilfields to splurge on oversized jewelled objects.
The next evening, Dad took me to play tennis. Afterwards, we sat on the terrace of a nearby café and shared some chips. He always treated me more like an adult than a child and didn’t hold back from telling me when things were going “tits up.” “I’m worried it might be my Mona Lisa, Cece,” he said, looking pensive.
I stared at him blankly. “Whaddya mean, Dad?” I asked, slurping my Diet Coke.
He explained that the Mona Lisa had a price tag of about $1 billion—so high that no one person could ever own it. The painting was now so fragile, and the cost of insuring it so high, that it couldn’t leave the Louvre and could only be seen behind glass. Lapsing into silence, he took a swig of his beer. “I’d like the egg to be in a museum one day,” he said, sounding more philosophical. “But right now, I just need someone to buy it.”
The next morning when I awoke, he was gone.
As the year drew to a close, the House of Kutchinsky teetered on the brink. A buyer for the egg still hadn’t materialized, a global recession was starting to bite, and the bank was threatening not to extend its credit. Personally, Dad was still in limbo—torn between the agony of hurting Brenda and not seeing us girls, and the ecstasy of being with Anna.
The final stop on the egg’s tour was Australia. Argyle had made it the star attraction of the 1990 Melbourne Cup, which it sponsored. This “$16 million thoroughbred,” as one newspaper ad described it, would be revealed to almost 300,000 racegoers. A press conference was planned to show it off to selected media and launch it in the southern hemisphere.
Paul agreed to the plan, but he was worried the egg’s notoriety was becoming problematic. The longer it went unsold, the more speculation mounted about why, leaving him to face the stark reality that nobody loved it as much as he did. He’d recently had some troubling feedback from a US-based diamond dealer who pitched it to a wealthy Wall Street banker, only for the banker to respond, “That old egg from Oz? Don’t waste my time on that lemon.”
Falling into a jet-lagged slumber, Paul was woken one morning by the shrill ring of the room phone. Argyle’s Ron Currie was calling in a panic: the egg’s doors wouldn’t open. Trying to sound surprised, Paul dressed and rushed up to the suite where the showcase was due to take place. When he arrived, Ron had his suit jacket off and was wrestling with the giant golden egg while other Argyle executives looked on, grim-faced.
Ignoring the fact that it was almost midnight in England, Paul called Gerald. Once the workshop manager had stopped cursing about his ruined sleep, Paul explained the problem. If the slightest misalignment occurred when the egg was slotted…The mechanism that powered the doors of the marble display cabinet would fail. It required exact precision, with various wires taped together to hold it in place. “If you get desperate, tip it upside down and rattle it around,” Gerald wheezed before hanging up. Their only hope was to claim the egg had been damaged in transit from London and pray the journalists believed it.
A natural talker, Paul survived the press conference by cycling through his repertoire of egg puns and joking about suing British Airways for £7 million in repairs. “That wasn’t too bad,” he whispered to Ron as the press began to leave. His friend winced. No amount of witty banter could hide the total humiliation.
Paul flew back to London without the egg. Argyle had placed it on display at a local museum. Although he was relieved to take a break from handling its logistics, it was the first time he had been separated from his golden ego.
Back in London, he faced a crushing financial reality. By early 1991, the House of Kutchinsky owed the bank over £1 million. Without an injection of capital, there would be no way to pay salaries, let alone address their ever-growing pile of creditors. Their bank manager made it clear he would not wait any longer for Paul to sell the egg.
After years of bad decisions, murky dealings, and mud-slinging, the end came suddenly and brutally. The company was sold to a rival jeweller, and Paul was forced out. Almost a hundred years of history—wiped out. I’ve always wondered why the business couldn’t be saved. Were the debts truly so catastrophic, and the family rifts so deep, that no one could work together to find a solution? Or did Dad secretly see the collapse of the business as his release from a life he was already drifting away from?
In 2002, Kutchinsky’s unsellable egg was sold. The Japanese buyer paid ¥800 million, about £4.3 million at the time, most of which went to Argyle, who had taken possession after the business collapsed. My dad wasn’t here to see it happen. The accident in 2000 had made the papers. “Jeweller killed in Spanish road crash,” reported the Jewish Chronicle, with no mention of Kutchinsky’s egg. Instead, it described Dad as a manufacturing jeweller from Hatton Garden, “the third generation of the family which successfully built up the prestigious shop in Knightsbridge.” Even in death, his father’s achievements still overshadowed his own.
Decades passed. Life moved on. I hid the picture of Dad cradling his egg in a drawer and tried to forget. But my unfulfilled quest still haunted me, returning at night, unbidden—a missing part of him, and of me.
Then one morning, I woke with a simple clarity: I needed to find it. And so, more than three decades after its debut at the V&A, I found myself standing in front of the egg once again—this time in a museum in Tokyo.
Lit up inside its glass display cabinet, it resembled a golden spaceship about to launch. Standing before it, I saw my reflection warped by the egg’s golden curve. It had become as much a part of my identity as it was Dad’s. Lost in thought, I almost didn’t notice Takashi Mabuchi and his wife, Reiko, arriving. They had donated the egg to the museum after the death of Takashi’s father, Kenichi, an eccentric and fearsome businessman with a magpie-like fascination for sparkly objects. Radiating grace and generosity, the Mabuchis swept into the room, shook my hand, and put me at ease.
Ritsuro Miyawaki, the museum’s head gemologist, darted ahead and began polishing the egg with his handkerchief, like a proud parent. As he stepped back, he pressed the switch to power on the motor. My heart raced. What if the mechanism failed?
As if by magic, the doors slid open.The pen and the interior rotated like a giant music box. It was flawless. I marveled at its celestial gleam, the perfect Barbie pink of its precious stones, and the splendor of the jeweled petals covering its dome. Beneath this sparkling display was our name, carved into its shell for posterity.
For years, Kutchinsky’s egg had been locked away in a bonded warehouse, almost as if it never existed. On the surface, its disappearance had brought peace, but underneath, my family’s wounds festered. When I began searching for it, there were bitter arguments and screaming matches. I understood it was painful for them, but I was determined that facing the past would restore the egg as a source of pride, polishing away the tarnish that had stained our memories.
Now, watching the egg work just as my father had always dreamed, I felt a rush of vindication. “It’s fixed,” I stammered. Takashi Mabuchi grinned broadly and placed a small, barrel-shaped motor in my hand. Speaking quickly, he explained that shortly after his father bought the egg, the doors had stopped opening again. So Takashi, an expert engineer, took a major risk. “My family had paid ¥800 million for it. If I destroyed it, it was my responsibility,” he said. “That’s why I had the courage to do it. I wouldn’t have dared if it belonged to someone else.”
Piece by piece, he took it apart. Replacing the motor had been easy—he bought a new one from a local electronics store for just ¥9,500 (about £50 in 2002). But as he installed it, he noticed a bigger problem. The doors were designed to rise up and slide back, meaning the top of the egg had to lift to make space, putting extra strain on the motor. Taking a blowtorch, Takashi soldered the egg’s golden hinges and redesigned it so the doors opened in a single motion. “The way it was designed, with the top and bottom moving together, was extremely advanced,” he explained, politely overlooking the fact that it had never worked.
Smiling back at this beaming billionaire, I felt my worries fade. The egg belonged here. That the people who bought it were among the few in the world with the skill to repair it felt like a perfect coincidence.
Growing up, I often wished my father had never made the egg and that our lives could return to how they were before. But now I see that would have been impossible. With or without it, the House of Kutchinsky’s foundations were already shaky, and my parents were pulling in different directions. In some ways, the egg became a shimmering scapegoat for my family’s misfortunes.
As the sky darkened, the Mabuchis bid me a polite goodbye. Grateful for their time and generosity, I hugged them, evoking amused horror on Takashi’s face. Hugging is not common in Japan, especially among older generations, my translator explained. Luckily, they took it in good spirits. As their chauffeur-driven car sped away, I could hear the echo of their laughter.
This is an edited extract from Kutchinsky’s Egg: A Family Story of Love, Loss & Obsession by Serena Kutchinsky, published by Gallery UK at £20. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Of course Here is a list of FAQs based on the intriguing premise provided
BeginnerLevel Questions
What is this story about
Its about a man whose allconsuming passion for creating a single magnificent jeweled egg led to the loss of his family and his wealth
What was the worlds largest jeweled egg
It was a massive ornate egg decorated with precious gems and metals created as an artistic obsession rather than a traditional Fabergéstyle egg
How did this obsession shatter his marriage
His singular focus on the egg likely meant he neglected his spouse spent excessive time and money on the project and prioritized the egg over his relationship
What does consume his fortune mean
It means he spent all of his moneylikely on rare gems precious metals expert craftsmanship and materialsto fund the creation of the egg leaving him financially ruined
Is this based on a true story
While it echoes themes from reallife stories of obsession this specific narrative appears to be a fictional or allegorical tale
Advanced Analytical Questions
What deeper themes does this story explore
It explores the destructive nature of obsession the conflict between artistic legacy and personal responsibility and how a pursuit of perfection can lead to profound loss
Was the egg a symbol of something in his life
Often in such stories the egg can symbolize a fragile dream an unhatched potential or a vain attempt to create something perfect to fill a personal void which ironically destroys the real imperfect beauty of his family
Couldnt he have balanced his project with his family life
The story suggests he could not An obsession by definition is allconsuming and irrational The scale of the project implies it demanded every resource he hademotional financial and temporal
What happened to the egg after he lost everything
The story doesnt say but it leads to poignant questions Did he sell it to recoup losses Did it become a museum piece a bitter monument to his loss Or did he keep it a hollow reminder of his sacrifice
What is the moral or lesson of this story
Its a cautionary tale warning that a singleminded pursuit even of something beautiful can cost you the things
