Gifting a Significant Piece, on Your Timing

A significant gift has three problems

The object is the easy part. The rest is where a significant gift goes wrong.

• Timing. The right piece appears months before the wedding, the birthday, the succession. Buying it and giving it are rarely the same moment.
• Discretion. A surprise only works if it stays one — no delivery to the family home, no paper trail across a shared desk.
• Paperwork. Wherever the recipient lives, their tax authority may later ask what the piece is, where it came from, and what it was worth. A gift without a record becomes a problem years later.

Hold it in Switzerland until the moment

The piece is acquired, verified and insured, then held in secure Swiss custody with the gift documents already prepared. You choose when it is handed over — in person, or delivered to the recipient — and when it is not, it stays safe, documented and discreet.

The purchase and the gift become two separate moments. You control both.

A gift record your advisors can use

Every significant gift leaves Maison Jade Club with a record: who gave what, to whom, when, and at what value — with the provenance behind it. It is assembled so the recipient's own advisors can handle the gift or inheritance tax in their country without friction. The same discipline that makes a purchase bank-ready makes a gift defensible.

Across borders, the tax follows home

Where the giver or the recipient lives decides the gift and inheritance tax — not Switzerland. For a person resident abroad, a gift of a movable piece generally raises no Swiss gift tax; the rules that apply are the home country's. Maison Jade Club and its Swiss partner never advise on home taxation. The documented gift goes to the family's own advisors, ready to use.

If you or the recipient live in Switzerland

Then Swiss cantonal gift tax enters, and it turns on the relationship, not the value. A gift to a spouse or registered partner is exempt in every canton. As cantonal law stands, a gift to children is exempt in most — a few tax it, among them Appenzell Innerrhoden, Neuchâtel and Vaud, and two levy no gift tax at all (Schwyz and Obwalden). There is no federal gift tax; for a movable gift, the canton where the giver lives decides.

What Maison Jade Club does

Maison Jade Club sources the piece, verifies it, and documents the gift. It arranges the handover or secure Swiss custody. It does not give tax advice: where residence, a canton or a border raises a question, a licensed structuring partner addresses it in the partner's own name.