| The $19,450 Phone
By MARK LEVINE
Published: December 1, 2002
Although the Beverly Hills retail outlet of a newly christened company called Vertu is situated on a stretch of Rodeo Drive whose storefronts are occupied by Chanel, Cartier, Harry Winston, Bernini, Van Cleef & Arpels and Lladró, Vertu is, by design, concealed from the sights of window-shoppers.
You can reach Vertu either through a rear alley or by walking straight through the Hugo Boss showroom, past the scrutinizing gaze of that store's nattily dressed sales crew, to the back entrance of the building, which is marked by an austere gray banner bearing nothing more than the name of the company and a logo that looks like an abstract rendering of a raptor's outstretched wings. Vertu is one flight up. It is generally open to the public by appointment only, and the hushed vacancy of its 3,500 square feet is broken only by the strains of ethereal New Age music.
One corner of the room displays commissioned art from the British photographer Christopher Bucklow -- ghostly silhouettes of human figures that resemble vividly tinted M.R.I.'s. The art is not for sale. It does, however, prepare the visitor for an encounter with Vertu's specialized and highly self-conscious vocabulary of shopping. Initiates refer to the store as a ''client suite,'' to the service that Vertu's product delivers as ''the experience'' and to the product itself -- the world's first custom-built luxury cellphone -- as ''the instrument.''
Along one side of the room's expanse of white wall are three mounted glass cases, vaguely reminiscent of panels in a religious altarpiece. At the center of each case is a black void, a little smaller than a shoebox, where, beneath fiber-optic spotlights and behind electromagnetic locks, lies the instrument, looking rather like the well-appointed offspring of a remote control and a slender electric shaver.
In the left display case is a model built from white gold, which sells for $13,000; in the center, an $11,350 yellow gold version; and on the right, the top-of-the-line platinum Vertu, which can be purchased for $19,450 and, for the first 1,000 buyers, comes with a certificate of ownership signed by Nuovo.
(Not on display: the most basic Vertu, encased in proletarian stainless steel. Price tag: $4,900.) All of the phones feature a sapphire crystal face, a sheath of soft Italian leather for comfortable gripping and a backing and pillow -- which your ear rests against -- fashioned from aerospace-grade ceramics. ''This is an experience in exquisite design and craftsmanship,'' Nuovo assures me. ''If the instrument were made out of copper, it would still be worth what it's worth.''
The instrument's keys are set on jeweled, rubylike bearings, which both produce a pleasant clicking sound with each touch and ensure that the keys will outlive those of ordinary cellphones by many thousands of repetitions; in the dark, the bearings also radiate a warm pinkish glow. The ring tones are polyphonic, have names like Raindrops, Constellation and Sandpiper and sound like motifs from Philip Glass compositions.
''Vertu'' is derived from the Latin word virtus, which means ''excellence.'' But, Litchfield says, it has another meaning as well: ''In the 18th and 19th centuries, wealthy individuals began to have small, personalized, highly crafted items designed for themselves -- typically cigarette cases or snuff boxes. They were known as 'vertu.' We see ourselves as the modern version of that tradition.''
Vertu made its debut this year on Jan. 21, at a reception at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Some 900 guests attended; Gwyneth Paltrow was photographed holding the instrument.
"...the phone's round-the-clock ''concierge'' service, which is accessed by a push of a button and which, according to British Vogue, ''is ready and waiting to organize everything for you, from a table at Nobu...."
In Vertu, Nuovo ''wanted to take something as unlikely as a communications technology and present it as art.'' And why not? His artistic hero is Leonardo da Vinci, for whom the marriage of art and technology made perfect sense. Nuovo's expressive medium just happens to be the cellphone.
Still, Nuovo realizes that a $20,000 cellphone might not gain an easy acceptance in a society as ambivalent about technology as it is about wealth, and he knows that he may not be able to convince skeptics. ''I'm not a marketing department,'' he says. ''I'm a vision department.''
I give in to curiosity. I ask to make a phone call to my girlfriend, Emily. The answering machine picks up. I whisper urgently into the phone: ''Are you there? Pick it up. I'm calling on a $13,000 white gold phone.''
Emily picks up. For a moment, we chat about our days. Then we talk about the quality of the sound, which I find to be crisp -- not without a hint of everyday cellphone quaver but surely a few notches clearer than the reception on my $99 plastic cellphone.
The gold is pleasantly cool on my cheek, and the leather grip is plush, and the weight in my hand feels rather -- luxurious. ''What do you think?'' Emily asks. ''How does it feel?'' I consider the instrument. I consider the experience. ''It feels good,'' I say.
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