Most of us don’t need telling that architects are cool these days. Rem Koolhaas, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, not forgetting Zaha Hadid, and their peers are accorded the sort of reverence that was once the preserve of rock stars. And they’re being asked to do a lot more than just put up buildings – big brands try to harness their design kudos to sprinkle a little magic over anything from furniture to ice buckets and candlesticks. One of the more serious of these collaborations is the growing partnership between Frank Gehry, probably best known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Tiffany, the jeweller.

It started in 2001, when the company asked Gehry to design a range of watches. It was such a happy collaboration that from there they went on to ask him to do jewellery, and the result was a collection that was extraordinarily different from anything else on the market, using as it did the mysterious forms and shapes (twisted cubes, towers, off-centre blocks) that made his buildings so compelling.

As Jon King, the executive vice-president of merchandising at Tiffany, puts it: “It brought in a whole new clientele – artists, design students, architects – who hadn’t thought of coming into Tiffany before.” As for Gehry, he apparently enjoyed working with Tiffany. “He loved the short lead time between creating the design and seeing it come alive, and the lack of bureaucracy,” King says.

With the jewellery collection Gehry and Tiffany established forms and motifs that are familiar to all those who know Gehry’s work. Tiffany scaled them down, took his famous fish shape, the torque (a cube twisted on itself), his Equus horse’s head, the open basketweave or lattice work that he used on the bandshell in the Millennium Park in Chicago, and turned them into rings and brooches, bracelets and necklaces.

Now, the company is taking the collaboration further, using these same much-admired shapes to create a range of tableware, salt and pepper sets, vases, bowls and candle-holders that will be launched at the Tiffany boutique at Selfridges, in Oxford Street, London, in August. Most will be limited editions, but a few pieces – those based on the distinctive overlapping timber shapes used in the summer pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery – will be one-offs.

Some will be expensive, but not all. The fish-shaped salt and pepper shakers are made from sterling silver and are beautiful, so £270 a pair doesn’t seem an extravagant sum. The same fish motif has been used to make an utterly original vase that will sell for about £4,400. There’s a compelling torque vase for £120 and a rock bowl in heavy blown glass for £750.

Gehry’s Equus motif, the design inspiration for the DZ bank in Berlin, has been reinterpreted in bowls and vases, and a reminder of the Chicago bandshell can be found in a bone china piece that will sell for about £2,250. Anyone falling in love with the pavilion at the Serpentine this summer will be able to buy pieces using combinations of crystal and silver that echo the patterns on the canopy. And finally, there are some beautiful blown glass pieces that have been made in collaboration with Archimedes Seguso, a famous glass studio on the island of Murano in Venice.

But these are mostly pieces to be bought and used. As King says: “It was never our intention to create museum gift-shop pieces – it was much more to take Frank’s design sensibility and translate it into wearable jewellery and usable tableware.”

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