When our founder Cliff Hartono was only five years old, his father gave him a trilobite, and this unforgettable gift sparked a lifelong passion for natural history. Cliff went on to graduate from NYU Stern School of Business, and worked in various roles in the finance industry. After spending long days with numbers and screens on the hectic trading floor of Credit Suisse in London, he would often seek refuge in one of the greatest museums in the world: the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.

His favourite corner of the museum was the Marine Reptiles Gallery, where numerous ichthyosaurs found over the last two centuries were hung. This was a place where time stood still. In the hushed halls of the gallery, the majesty of the specimens spoke for themselves.

Cliff probably spent hours studying the intricate bones on display in that gallery. It was here, alone with these ancient things, that a vision was born to bring such extraordinary specimens back to his adopted home, Singapore. In a leap of faith, Cliff quit his banking job in 2012 and began his quest to unearth extinct beauty.

He ventured into the hills of Wyoming, a prime location for finding rare fish and plant fossils trapped in a tropical lake from about 50 million years ago. He learned of the painstaking labour of fossil preparators who worked at removing layers of sludge and rock, millimetre by millimetre. Over the course of that year, Cliff traveled extensively around the world to explore dig sites and to acquire Set in Stone’s first collection.

Cliff Hartono led Set in Stone Gallery to its first exhibition in April 2013 and continues his pursuit of extinct beauty to this day. The gallery has since expanded its offerings to encompass minerals, crystals and objet d’art created by fine artisans who have a storied connection to natural materials. Discover more about what we do.

When Cliff is not discovering these lost and found gifts of nature, he can be found surfing in Indonesia.