There are four claws and there are four of everything else. The stone has to be held on four points and no fewer, seated at one depth and no deeper, with a margin of metal left on the crown that the eye reads as generosity even when it is only structural.
You do not press a stone into place. You remove everything around it until the stone is the only thing left.
This is why the bench is quiet. Setting is precision work performed at a scale of a few millimetres, and the tolerance is smaller than the tremor in most hands on a good day. The bench is quiet because nobody is talking over the work.
What the house counts
Seat depth. Claw symmetry. The width of the finished metal at the tightest point. None of these are visible from across a room, and all of them are visible at the distance a person actually looks at a ring they are holding.
