Based in Los Angeles, California, this Lebanese-American designer draws on sculpture and architecture for his jewelry aesthetic.
How did you get started in the industry?
My father and grandfather were jewelers and watchmakers, and growing up around my father’s shop in Beirut, I was always enamored with his sophisticated clientele. My father (correctly) insisted that I get a traditional academic education, so it wasn’t until after I finished college in Paris that I came to California to study at the Gemological Institute of America (GIA).
How would you define the creative atmosphere of LA?
Recently, I’ve been thinking more about the meaning of “creativity.” It seems to be related to an ability to think critically, orthogonally, and abstractly relative to conventional wisdom. And despite a lot of recent buzz in the media, it isn’t obvious to me that this happens more frequently in LA than elsewhere — or if creative people are usually concerned with its prevalence. Something I do know is that for 30 years, LA has been a good home for me, and now I’m raising my own young family here.
How do your Lebanese origins influence your designs?
Lebanon has a great tradition of jewelry. Even today, Lebanese women tend to collect and wear jewelry more than their American and western-European counterparts. It is something with enduring cultural significance.
What are your other sources of inspiration?
Art and architecture are my biggest sources of inspiration. The ability of the sculptor or the architect to evoke a feeling using nothing more than an abstract form is a special kind of magic.
Which jewelry designers do you admire?
I’ve been a longtime fan of Art Smith, Suzanne Belperron, Betty Cooke, Jack Boyd, Andrew Grima and Alexander Calder, to name a few.
How do you choose, source and work with materials and gemstones?
Having collected gemstones for the past 30 years, most of the stones that I work with come from my existing library. When I’m buying, I look for unusual specimens — stones that have unusual color, size or shape. Sometimes they’re exceptionally clear, or exceptionally included. There are no hard-and-fast rules. The most important thing for me is that they’re interesting.
What is your most recent collection about?
The recent collection is what I call Continuum Moment 3 — and if I had to describe it in a word, it would be “prehistoric.” The aesthetic is an abstract, modernistic interpretation of primitive shapes. The first people who witnessed the work likened it to bones and fossils, but the beauty of the situation is that there is plenty of room for interpretation and reinterpretation.
Can you explain the making of a specific piece of jewelry?
The Echo ring was the first piece I designed for the brand, and I designed it a year before I even knew there would be a brand. It happened in the month or so just after my daughter Elsa was born in 2015. I wasn’t sleeping enough, and I had started sketching and journaling at night as a way of recording my dreams. So the first sketches of Echo came from that process — done in the middle of the night, under the flashlight of my iPhone so as not to wake my dormant wife and daughter.
The initial prototype was created with the help of two members of my team and rendered simply in polished 18-karat yellow gold. In subsequent versions, we refined the technical aspects of the design, redistributing the weight and adding various gemstone treatments or kinetic elements, while keeping the shape and the spirit intact.
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