A special education attorney by day, and a vintage jewelry maven by night.

Paula Cohen, the founder of PRCNYC — which has become a go-to for all things vintage and antique baubles — wears both hats. And though they don’t sound more different, she thinks they’re more alike than they are different.

“I love working with women, I love working with families who I can bring joy to, and I love deep and long-lasting relationships,” Cohen says of her clientele for each. “The jewelry and the law are a yin and a yang, but there’s a lot of overlapping in terms of the connections we share.”

Cohen is something of a self-taught expert in jewelry and has always been drawn to collecting vintage pieces, she says. She curates every piece one-by-one from her travels, which span the globe. (France is a favorite and she recently stopped over in Spain and Portugal.) “I don’t buy estates, I don’t buy big groupings of pieces,” she says. “I have a feeling for each piece, what’s the style, what’s the heritage, what’s the quality, how is it made and where?”

PRCNYC is almost entirely word-of-mouth, and doesn’t even have a website. Its Instagram account has barely 1,000 followers, and she does most of her deals with single clients at a time at her dining room table. “I have private appointments, where I want to see what you have so that way we don’t duplicate and instead, we add.”

In that vein, she’s part-hostess, part-stylist, part-treasure hunter. How does she describe herself? “I call myself a jewel therapist,” she says. “It’s so interwoven with personal relationships, or purchasing things associated with a milestone. Not just a birthday or an anniversary, but something really special in their lives.”

Cohen’s own choice of provenance is the Georgian period, and her favorite ring is an old European cut diamond from the epoch. She’s attracted to multifunctional pieces that can be worn in multiple ways, “like a multilevel necklace that can also be a brooch or a bracelet,” she says.

She has found most of the pieces she’s lusted after, but her Holy Grail is a sautoir of old mine cut diamonds from the Victorian period. “I adore antique stones. They were hand-cut under candlelight,” she says. “Each stone is absolutely different, and when you look at them side-by-side, every single one has a rare and unique beauty.”