At her stately brick atelier in San Antonio, a former Southwest Bell Telephone Exchange from the 1920s, Holly Tupper is doing one of the many things she does best. Tupper, creative director and founder of Cultus Artem — a luxury fragrance, artisanal skincare and fine jewelry house based in Texas — notes: “I make things that give me pleasure.“

For the past 30 years, Cultus Artem perfumes, organic skincare and hand-wrought necklaces, earrings, rings and bracelets have also brought pleasure to discerning shoppers around the globe. 

Tupper transformed the 13,000-square-foot former Southwest Bell building into a design studio, fragrance lab, business hub and showroom (where she hosts her salon series and curated partnerships, most recently with Marfa Stance) for Cultus Artem. Using her practiced eye for creating beauty, Tupper designed an opulent environment decorated with Southeast Asian and Texas antiques, along with repurposed and upcycled objets collected from a life well-traveled. A native New Yorker who married a Texan, Tupper and her husband were originally in finance, and the family lived all over Asia, particularly Singapore, before they came back home to the Lone Star State.

Tupper recently launched the new Cultus Artem Flats Collection, inspired by her family ranch along the Camino Real Trail in South Texas.

“The natural environment has always been a really important source of inspiration for me,” says Tupper, who has been drawn to nature ever since she spent her childhood summers in the Rhode Island countryside. “I was feral for the whole summer, I basically slept in the woods.” Tupper laughs.

The Texas ranch, though a far cry from those New England forests, is another remote and beautiful spot, where you can hear the call of coyotes and javelinas, with the closest town a good 45 minutes away. 

Tupper’s ranch is an especially rich and fertile resource for both inspiration and material for the collection. She forages found materials from the land — bits of screen, barbed wire, mesquite — into impressive 18-karat gold creations.

She selects precious stones “redolent of colors in the landscape.” Her exquisite jewelry is hand-crafted from the highest-grade, responsibly-sourced natural materials, and she intentionally works with artisan stonecutters and small family operators to achieve the attention to detail her work demands.

Reminiscent of a French couture house, each Cultus Artem creation is made by hand. For Tupper, everything begins with the materials. The sourcing, sparkle and story behind each stone inspire her design process.

In a way, Tupper is what you might call a “gemstone whisperer.” Sometimes, she’ll hold onto a stone for 10 or 20 years before inspiration hits. Then she’ll know, in an instant, exactly how she wants to work it into a new piece.

Holly Tupper’s Jewels

Memento Amore, a cornerstone of the Flats Collection, is an 18-karat gold and spinel-crystal pendant designed to hold a porcelain disc infused with one of Cultus Artem’s heady house fragrances. The gold is etched with sinuous lines inspired by the rattlesnakes along the road on the Ranch. The spinel evokes the deep red-pink color of prickly pear fruit that dots the landscape, and the crystals sparkle like mica in the Texas soil.

The Emerald Chimes Ring was inspired by a bit of metal screen buried in the sand. Tupper also loves to work with pearls for their luster and because they move so beautifully. A new green tourmaline and pearl necklace is designed to move in a pas de deux with the wearer. 

The creative process is similar in the creation of her otherworldly, all-natural Cultus Artem fragrances (which are sold at Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus), which have been lauded for a thoughtful, curated approach to scent creation. “I think like a sculptor,” Tupper says. “Only I’m sculpting with ingredients that you can’t see and touch.” 

Inspired by ingredients that speak to her, Tupper creates art pieces that are unique and can be deeply transformative. With the new Cultus Artem Flats Collection, she infuses the fierce spirit and xeric topography of South Texas into her designs in an inventive, whimsical and soulful way. Starting from a raw landscape already imbued with so much magic, the results are bound to be irresistible, hypnotic and utterly enchanting.