Monica Varela and Marchanta Out East: A Season in the Hamptons

East Hampton spent August surrounded by sculpture, scent, and Dominican blue.

From August 4 through September 8, Monica Varela was part of Marchanta Out East, a curated activation in the heart of East Hampton, NY, dedicated to Latin American design at its most refined. For a full month, one of the Hamptons’ most exclusive audiences got to experience Monica Varela jewelry inside a space built entirely around craftsmanship, culture, and the kind of quiet luxury that never needs to explain itself.

A Connection That Started Long Before the Pop-Up

Behind the activation is Raylin Díaz, a Dominican creative director whose résumé reads like a masterclass in visual storytelling: global lead of visual presentation for Diane von Furstenberg, visual creative director for Saks Fifth Avenue’s windows in New York, visual advisor for the Maison Objet Academy in Paris. Today, Raylin is the founder and creative director of Marchanta, and the artistic director of Indómita, a nonprofit supporting emerging Dominican talent.

His story and Mónica’s have been running in parallel for a while.

“From the moment we met, we fell in love with each other’s work,” Mónica says of Díaz. “It was an immediate connection, the kind that comes from sharing the same eye for beauty, the same instinct for what’s worth elevating, and the same desire to see Dominican craft reach the heights it deserves. We even gravitate toward the same places, the same people.”

“It felt less like meeting someone new and more like recognizing something familiar.”

Two Dominican creatives, each building a luxury language rooted in their own culture, each determined to prove that Dominican craftsmanship belongs in the most demanding rooms in the world. Marchanta Out East gave both of them exactly that room.

Inside Marchanta Out East

Located at 62 Newtown Lane, in the center of East Hampton village, Marchanta Out East was conceived as a gallery and showroom rather than a traditional retail pop-up, an open collective bringing together art, home, fashion, and jewelry from a rotating cast of Latin American and local designers. The activation’s purpose was direct and ambitious: to present the Latin American creative community not as an accent to the design world, but as one of its defining forces.

Monica Varela was featured within the jewelry category, alongside a curated group of names including Agua by Agua Bendita, Arthur Vallin, Parme Marin, Aedes Perfumery, Monika Chiang, Dochy Santos, Lu & Bo and N2B4B. The company was intentional. Every brand inside Marchanta Out East shared a commitment to responsible craftsmanship and a refusal to treat Latin design as a trend rather than a tradition.

Marchanta itself, founded in Santiago, Dominican Republic in 2022, built its own name on collectible sculptural objects and scented candles made entirely in the Dominican Republic, with local materials and local hands. The brand’s mission, elevating ethical, Caribbean-rooted luxury onto a global stage, made it a natural home for Monica Varela’s own philosophy: that a Dominican material, treated with enough rigor, belongs in any conversation about fine design.

A Summer-Long Introduction

For a full month, visitors to one of the country’s most design-literate zip codes encountered Monica Varela jewelry in exactly the context it was made for: beside sculpture and considered objects, inside a space that asked people to slow down and look closely, the same instinct behind every piece Mónica designs.

It is one thing to describe Dominican craftsmanship as luxury. It is another to place it inside a gallery in East Hampton and watch people respond to it on those terms; no translation required.

Marchanta Out East ran as the brand’s summer 2026 activation, and for Monica Varela, it marks another step in an ongoing story: two Dominican-rooted luxury houses, each insisting that the most compelling design in the world can come from home, choosing to tell that story together and proving that some collaborations are simply inevitable.