In 2006, Frank Nuovo was 45 — “boom!” he says, “five more years to 50!” — and at the top of his game. Except for one thing: “I’d kind of lost my soul.”

As chief of design at Nokia, the world’s leading mobile phone supplier, Nuovo presided over a huge team that brought 250 products and accessories to market each year. Among many other things, he was credited with inventing removable face plates, those colorful accessories that turn a phone into a personal fashion statement.

But something wasn’t right. Everybody’s heard of the Peter Principle, the idea that organizations tend to promote people to one level beyond their competency. But what do you call an almost-opposite phenomenon, when a person is promoted to the highest heights and excels at that altitude, but is left feeling empty? Whatever you call it, that’s what Nuovo was experiencing.

“It was painful. Being chief of design at Nokia was a dream job, and I had so much invested,” he says, describing the creative crossroads at which he found himself. But when it came to hands-on design, he recalls, “I was talking about it rather than doing it. And I needed to go back to doing it before I talked about it anymore.”

So, four years ago, a few days after his 45th birthday, Nuovo stepped down — or up, depending on your point of view. Immediately, he set about re-educating himself, mastering new design tools, like for modeling and Photoshop, that had become essential in the years he’d been busy with administration and corporate strategy. With Nokia’s blessing, he also became a full-time champion of Vertu, a subsidiary he had set in motion in 1998 and had been nurturing ever since.

Nuovo says Vertu, a maker of cell phones so high-end that he calls them “communication devices,” made him whole again.

Some may mock the idea that Nuovo relocated his soul by devoting himself to creating status symbols for the world’s richest people. Vertu phones, after all, are made of gold, platinum, titanium and stainless steel. Some are wrapped in hand-tooled leather and ostrich skin or set with pave diamonds. Depending on their bling factor, most Vertu phones retail from $5,000 to $25,000. (Special editions start at $80,000; one sculpted gold-and-sapphire phone sold for more than $325,000.)

One tech blog could have been channeling Veblen when it declared: “Overkill, thy name is Vertu.” But Nuovo, an amiable Californian who lives in Bel Air and tends to wear black blazers over black T-shirts, rejects that critique. Beautiful objects are desirable, he says. And as objects go, the cell phone is increasingly more ubiquitous than those old lions of luxury, fancy pens and wristwatches.

Vertu won’t release sales figures, but Nuovo says the company — which has more than 80 boutiques in cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Milan, Las Vegas and London and is opening one on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills in May — is plenty profitable, even in these tight times.

“The watch is disappearing. And everybody in the world is walking around with these,” he says on a recent afternoon, spreading an assortment of cell phones — all of them Nokias or Vertus of his own making — on a table at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., where he was once a student.