The atelier

The stone, first

Nothing is drawn until there is a stone. A design made around a stone that does not yet exist commits the client to proportions before anybody knows what has to fit inside them, and the stone that eventually arrives is then either forced into the wrong seat or the drawing is quietly changed.

Selection happens here, under north light, against a white card, face down before face up. Two to four weeks, depending on what is being looked for.

Drawn at one to one

The design is drawn at life size on paper and checked against the stone with a gauge. Nothing is presented enlarged — including on this website, which is why every piece here is rendered at the millimetre dimensions recorded on its own page.

Almost every commission changes at this stage. A head that looks balanced at three times size looks heavy at life size. This is the cheapest hour in the whole process and the one that prevents most of the expensive ones. One week, usually two meetings.

Carved in wax, cast in one

The shank and the head are carved as a single body and cast together. It would be faster to cast the shank, make the head separately, and solder the two — and that soldered joint is where the ring fails, typically thirty years later, typically while it is being pulled off a finger.

Casting, cleaning up and filing: three to four weeks.

The seat

The seat is cut to the stone itself, not to its certificate. Girdles are not perfectly round and are not of even thickness, and a seat cut to a nominal 6.50mm for a stone that measures 6.48 by 6.53 will hold that stone on two points instead of four.

This is the most skilled hour in the making of a ring, and it is done under a microscope.

Set, unset, polished, set again

The stone goes in. Then it comes out, the piece is polished properly with the setting empty, and the stone goes back. It is slower and it is the only way the metal immediately around a stone finishes correctly — a mop cannot reach into a closed setting, and a setting polished only from the outside always shows it under a loupe.

Two to three weeks, and the second setting is done by the same pair of hands as the first.

Hallmarked and marked

The finished piece goes to the assay office to be tested and struck. When it comes back it is given the house reference, which ties it to its drawing and its stone paperwork in our records, and the setter’s mark.

That mark is the reason we can tell you, twenty years from now, who made your ring — and it is the reason they finish it as though we will be asked.