Meet the makers of the world’s most famous jewels

At 8am the Bunsen burners are firing up in the top-floor workshop of 180 New Bond Street.

Jewel mounters Alan Pither, 64, and his son Lewis, 23, take their seats. In front of them are piles of precious, sparkling white diamonds and scarlet rubies ready to be transformed into masterpieces. Welcome to jewellery house David Morris, the last brand on New Bond Street to still have its own workshop. 

Whether you know it or not, you are probably already familiar with David Morris’s masterpieces. Earlier this year, Olivia Colman collected her award for best actress at the Golden Globes bejewelled in the house’s white diamond earrings and 18-carat white gold and diamond rings. A David Morris dragon adorned the bonnet of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Aston Martin on their wedding day.

Specialising in delicate and feminine design, the house’s client list is a roll call of the famous and fabulous: Elizabeth Taylor, Beyoncé, Oprah Winfrey, Céline Dion.

When I arrive I’m whisked upstairs through a secret trompe l’oeil door to a huge office, which belongs to Jeremy Morris and has the best view of Bond Street. Morris took over the role of CEO and creative director 15 years ago from his father, who founded the jewellery house in 1962. 

Noted in the industry for his brilliant eye for colour and cut, the rakish Morris knows every step in every piece of jewellery’s timeline, from buying the stones to where it sells, and who buys it. As a youngster he trained at the benches of jewellers in London and Paris. ‘The difference at David Morris is that I spent four years making jewellery, so I know what a piece should look like, the proportions, the depths,’ he says. But what really makes him tick is the stones. ‘It’s all about the colour, the stone has to talk to you.’ 

More than ever, the brand conducts business on WhatsApp. ‘We sold a pair of $600,000 pink and white diamond earrings to a client in Abu Dhabi over WhatsApp about a month ago. People buy jewellery without even walking through the shop door because they know the quality of our work,’ he says. 

Morris works closely with the three-strong design team, passing them Post-it notes scribbled with ideas. Inspiration often starts with the stones. Senior designer Julian Medwell shows me a 3D printed mock-up of a geometric bracelet, which he designed around a rare set of 50 elongated cushion cut diamonds that took a couple of years for Morris to source and collect. Meanwhile, head designer Sumi Kim is painting in beautiful gouache a design inspired by 13 pomegranate-red rubies. 

The magic happens up another flight of stairs, where Kim’s rubies are being laid out by Lewis Pither. It is his and his father Alan’s job to hand-make the silver collets into which each stone is mounted. Then, under lamp-light and his Leica microscope, setter Paul Barfield, who has worked at the house for 34 years, pushes each stone into its collet and secures it, the whole process transforming single stones into a remarkable piece of jewellery. A recent choker packed with rubies that flowed seamlessly over the neckline took six months to make and sold within three weeks. 

The work doesn’t stop when the atelier closes at 6pm — the private shopping area downstairs transforms into dinner parties for VIPs and prospective clients. ‘These clients have seen everything,’ says Louise de Turckheim, director of global marketing and communications. ‘The events we put on have got to be exclusive and personally tailored around each client’s interest.’ This could be a private tour of Blenheim Palace or a banquet at the British embassy in Paris. 

Christmas means a pop-up in the exclusive Gstaad Palace Hotel, which will be filled with 100 David Morris pieces, many one of a kind. It’s all about wintry blue sapphires, icy white diamonds, but, more than that, it’s about the seriously impressive craftsmanship of the David Morris team.

In partnership with David Morris.