Cosmic Opulence: Griegst

Amongst jewellery and design aficionados, the Griegst boutique with its baroque gothic, molten graphics, is a place of pilgrimage that continues to captivate mothers and daughters, brothers, lovers, and friends. Here you will find archival collections of the late Arje Griegst alongside contemporary variations that explore the grand themes of his work influenced by the wonders of the oceanic, cosmic, and botanical worlds. Find rings that appear to explode like a volcano expelling diamonds, sapphires, and pearls; spiralling necklaces in 24ct gold that lull you into a trance; bracelets that echo the rocaille frills of shells; and colliers that dazzle like nebulas.

“My father was awestruck by the materials and movements of cosmic lifeforms and events,” says Noam Griegst who took over the house with his sister Marie and mother Irene in 2016 after his father’s death. The photographer and filmmaker has an intuitive understanding of his father’s exceptional craft and before taking the helm learnt his jewellery making skills on the bench. “The workshop, like our home, was like this big grotto, with precious things just casually slung everywhere – jewels, old coins, figurines,” he recalls.

There’s also a grand legacy of disruption to draw upon. Arje Griegst, who set up his atelier in 1963, was a rebel at heart eschewing the dominant codes of reductive Nordic minimalism and allowing his fervid imagination to shape his designs. The forms range from the swirling and amorphic to the phantasmagorical, with molten faces carved into stones surrounded by baroque gold settings. A renaissance creative, Griegst also created tableware with Royal Copenhagen (the sinuous Spira cutlery with twisted stem handles is seriously covetable); candelabras topped with agate eggs and fountains including one triumphant bronze sculpture in the Tivoli Gardens. He used his own variation on a cire perdue (lost wax) technique to shape his extra-ordinary febrile forms that draw on Roman and Greek myths. You can imagine his atelier being a hothouse of molten smoke, psychedelic rock, and wax.

Today, Griegst designs (in museum collections worldwide) like those of Suzanne Belperron or Schiaparelli, have the power to enchant and beguile against a blanket of sameness.