Nothing reaches the BENCHwithout a HISTORY.
Metal and stone are the two decisions that outlast every other one you will make here. They set what the piece weighs, how it ages, how it catches light in a room, and what it will cost to keep. This is what we work in, where it comes from, and how to choose between it.
Metals
18ct yellow gold
Seventy-five per cent gold, alloyed warm. Soft enough to be worked finely and to be repaired forever, hard enough to hold a claw. Our default, and the metal most inherited pieces are made of — which matters if yours has to sit beside one.
18ct rose gold
The same gold content with copper in the alloy. Harder than yellow and noticeably harder to work, but it wears superbly and it flatters warm and olive skin in a way neither yellow nor white quite does. It cannot be rhodium-stripped or re-toned, so what you choose is permanent.
Platinum 950
Ninety-five per cent platinum. Almost twice the weight of gold, entirely hypoallergenic, and unusual in that it displaces rather than loses metal when scratched — a platinum ring keeps its mass across a lifetime. It develops a soft grey patina that some clients love and others have polished off annually.
Stones
Old-cut diamonds
Cut by hand before 1930 for candlelight rather than for a laboratory grade: high crowns, small tables, open culets. They flash slowly and warmly instead of scintillating, they are almost always recycled, and no two are alike. Most of what we set.
Heirloom stones
Stones out of pieces you already own. We assess them under magnification first and say honestly what we find: old cuts often carry girdle chips that must be designed around, and some stones are better left in the setting they came in. When they can be reset, they usually become the best piece we make that year.
Coloured sapphires
Corundum, one point below diamond on the hardness scale and entirely suitable for daily wear. We buy Montana, Australian and Sri Lankan stones from named cutters — teals, greys, warm golds and the pale blue-greens that photograph badly and look extraordinary in person.
Every piece is STRUCKbefore it is FINISHED.
British law requires precious metal above a certain weight to be independently tested and marked before it can be sold, and we send everything we make — including pieces under the threshold. The marks record the metal’s fineness, the office that tested it, the year, and the workshop that made it. It is the one part of your piece we do not do ourselves, and the only proof of what it is made of that does not depend on trusting us.
Choose the metal in the ROOM,not on a SCREEN.
We keep samples of everything above at the bench.
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