The Corren Solitaire

The solitaire is the shape everyone can already picture, which makes it the hardest one to make well. There is nothing to hide behind: no cluster to carry the eye, no engraving to distract from a shoulder that sits half a millimetre out. Every judgement is visible, and the ones that matter happen underneath, where nobody looks.

The Corren takes its proportions from a ring we made in our first year and have been quietly correcting ever since. The band is a true knife edge — a rolled section that narrows to a fine ridge along the top — so that from the side the metal reads as a bright line and the stone appears to be sitting on air. It is a much older idea than it looks. Knife-edge shanks were common in the eighteen-nineties precisely because they let a modest stone read as large, and they fell out of fashion when casting replaced hand-forging and nobody wanted to file the edge back true.

We forge it rather than cast it. A forged shank is denser than a cast one, work-hardened along its length, and it holds an edge that a cast ring loses within a couple of years of daily wear. It also means the ring can be sized many times over a lifetime without the shank going soft where it has been cut.

The setting is a four-claw basket cut from a single piece of metal rather than assembled from wire. The seats are cut to the stone rather than the stone pushed into a generic seat, which is slower and is the reason our claws are noticeably shorter than most — a well-seated stone needs very little metal over it, and less metal over the crown means more light through it. The basket is left open underneath, both for light and so the stone can be checked and cleaned without unsetting anything.

What changes per commission: the centre stone, obviously, but also the height of the basket (we set lower for anyone who works with their hands), the taper of the shoulders, and whether the band is finished bright or given a matte drag that hides scratches. We have made this ring as a plain 0.5ct daily piece and as a 2.4ct old cut that had come out of a brooch. Both were the same drawing.