The Jewellery Designer Reimagining How We Wear Diamonds

“Personally, I don’t want to be too peacocky and that influences my work. I might design a piece featuring stones worth £500,000 but I imagine it being worn not in an ostentatious way but with your hair down, so the stones appear subtle and beautiful. If you know, you know,” says New Zealand born Jessica McCormack.

Over the years, her exquisite yet casual approach to jewellery has attracted a legion of fans who return time and time again for new keepsakes and McCormack’s wizardry at resetting and designing stones into pieces to wear everyday. “I recently worked for one client who brought in a huge Colombian emerald brooch. It had not been worn in 12 years – so we created a ring and a bracelet. Another, owned pearl strand earrings that she once wore for her wedding day. Pearl earrings can be quite aging so I reinvented the stones as one beautiful long necklace,” says McCormack.

McCormack is guided by traditional jeweller practice in making reinvention part of her offer alongside designing new pieces. She works with clients throughout their life from coming of age, to marriage, birth of children to help them build a collection that is personal and coherent. “In previous eras, you would have a hatmaker, a lawyer, a doctor, a jeweller and a dentist – specialist experts,” she says of the ‘circle,’ that she is parlaying into the modern day.

Her own sense of design and fascination with artisanship was cultivated by her antique dealer father. She began reworking jewellery with no training on the bench and learnt about the craft and history while employed as a specialist at Sotheby’s in London. She loves soft rather than claw settings for stones inspired by techniques in the Georgian era and the unique characteristics of hand cut rather than laser cut stones.

Now, she employs a team of artisans in her Carlos Place townhouse store that is beautifully decorated with art and objets curated by her business partners who are collectors and dealers. On entering, via the fabulous Hass Brothers sculpture that explodes into gold leaves like a palm, you are invited to try on, to explore, to talk and investigate the three floors. Questions of prices are dealt with later. “The space was a huge risk - like being given keys to a sports car that you don't know how to drive but then you learn along the way but it has become a real ‘home’,” smiles McCormack.

Signature designs such as the Ball n Chain necklace (each of the gold balls is handmade) and the gorgeous free floating Gypset earrings, the blackened white gold diamond stackable rings attract a roster of clients including Zoe Kravitz, Dakota Johnsson and Barbara Sturm. “I don’t sit down to design, but ideas just come to me – in the shower, on the school run – and then I figure out how to make them real,” she explains. Her obsession with restoration has come full circle with a line of one off bespoke restored marquetry jewellery boxes that can be customised with embroidered linings to treasure the client’s own story. After all, jewellery is the most intimate form of adornment.