Years before Frank Camaratta Jr. founded his chess equipment manufacturing company, the House of Staunton, he sat over the board as a competitive player. That background, combined with his passion as an antique chess set collector, solidified his understanding and appreciation for the feel and construction of high-quality pieces. But when he surveyed the modern pieces on the market, especially those used in tournament play, he realized they didn’t measure up. "I was a serious tournament player and reached a fairly significant international rank," he says, "but I was always disappointed with the quality of the wooden chess sets. They had all lost their old-world charm. The knights were big, hulking creatures and the rooks were hardly taller than pawns. There was no continuity."

So in 1990, with a bevy of antique styles at his disposal, Camaratta set out to design and make a set of chess pieces that returned the game’s figures to their former glory. The first standard design for a set of chess pieces—named after Howard Staunton, a reputable British player and Shakespearean scholar from the mid-19th century—was crafted by John Jaques of London. The largest piece was the king; the most powerful, the queen; but it was the knight that defined the set for its level of detail. The original Staunton knights were modeled after steeds depicted in a frieze that adorned the Parthenon’s inner chamber. In re-creating a classic Staunton style, Camaratta chose not to reproduce the existing antique pieces that he had, but instead, by studying the artwork of that frieze and replicating the process by which the original Staunton pieces were made, he created a knight of his own design. "I beveled the pieces to make them look like they’re floating," he says. "It’s a nice clean visual presentation.

"Everyone has said that they just feel right," he adds, "and that might just be from my years of play."

The Staunton design may have opened the game of chess to the masses, due to a simplified pattern that allowed for greater production, but opulent pieces also existed, most often made out of ivory. Those ivory pieces fell out of production in the early 1960s, however, when the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned the sale of elephant and walrus ivory. Today, Camaratta produces made-to-order pieces made out of 40,000-year-old mammoth ivory and ebony (shown here), which cost $8,499. Excavating the material from the permafrost of the Siberian tundra, the company can make those ivory pieces only because the mammoth specimens have been deemed fossils.

According to Camaratta, the price of mammoth ivory has more than doubled in recent years, which he attributes to a growing demand for luxury goods in emerging countries such as India and China. On top of that, he says that less than 1 percent of the mammoth ivory excavated is suitable for chess-piece manufacturing, which makes any of these bespoke sets a treasure for the passionate player or collector.

The House of Staunton, www.houseofstaunton.com