Christian Hemmerle: Our Pieces Are Defined By Craftsmanship And Quality

Pieces by the German brand Hemmerle don’t really fit into any particular defined category of jewellery. On the one hand, it’s rightfully classed as high jewellery art: Hemmerle’s work successfully sells at huge global auctions, is exhibited at famous galleries and enters the collections of jewellery experts and aficionados. The name Hemmerle can be found at the top of the world’s jewellery ranking tables. On the other hand, the total non-conformism of the brand has shocked and surprised: sometimes it seems as if Hemmerle is teasing the prim, traditional jewellery world. It’ll make brooches peppered with diamonds that look like mushrooms, or fix a huge sapphire to a frame made of brass or wood and steel…

Now the maison is a fourth generation family business run by Christian Hemmerle and his wife Yasmin. Representing J&W Magazine, I met Christian Hemmerle at the Masterpiece exhibition in London.

Christian Hemmerle: Our pieces are defined by craftsmanship and quality. A single piece can take up to 500 hours of work and we can spend years waiting to find the exact right colour stones to complete a piece. It’s this care and attention to detail that makes a piece of jewellery valuable. We aim to create work that is innovative and imaginative, pieces that can be appreciated as art-forms. Originality is what makes something unique. The juxtaposition of materials we use also gives our jewellery a different edge.

CH: We are a fourth generation family run business so various techniques have been handed down by our ancestors. We’ve pioneered various mechanisms and our pieces are carefully weighted to be light with the perfect balance of movement. They move with the wearer and reflect light in different ways. Our open-ended harmony bangle with its seamless closure is a good example of our engineering. We have also continued to use traditional techniques such an old Austrian technique of knitting hand-drilled cut stones in the round over a silk mesh. It is very important how the piece feels while worn, so our techniques have had to change to perfect this.

CH: There is definitely something wonderfully quirky about our vegetable collection and I think this is what made the accompanying book Delicious Jewels so popular around the world. We also launched a series inspired by fruits, trees, leaves and seeds this year called Nature’s Jewels. Our cork oak brooch has leaves that look like they’ve been nibbled at by an insect. A touch of playfulness can make a piece more interesting and uplifting.

CH: The idea is to offer a wider choice of colour. We have these boxes for all the metals we work with including copper, iron and gold as well as brass. They are continually developing as we are always trying to match stones with the perfect colour of metal. Each stone has subtle colour differences and this has to be reflected in our choice of metals.

CH: We wanted to create a new surface with an intense texture. By setting the stones of earrings upside down, for example, you lend a different play of light and sparkle to the wearer’s face. It also creates structure and gives the piece a very different, modern feeling. In our Nature’s Jewels collection we also used it to create a very realistic effect, for example the spikes on a chestnut shell.

CH: One of things we like about working with wood is that the material often has a great smell, particularly olive wood. We are always searching for new woods in random places. We recently saw a piece of furniture made from French walnut in a market in Paris and we are now experimenting with how we could use that type of wood.

CH: We also sell from our Munich boutique on Maximilianstrasse and by private appointment all over the world. Our pieces have been shown in museums in Abu Dhabi, Atlanta, Chicago, Doha, Houston, London, Munich, Paris, Pforzheim, Sydney, Toronto and Tokyo. Our aim is to fulfil an aesthetic and the family-run nature of our business and the time it takes create our pieces means we will always be specialised contemporary artists. There are only a few exceptional craftsmen in the world who can work at the level we require so we usually produce less than 300 pieces a year. We hope we’ll continue to preserve these skills for generations to come. We are primarily concerned with the process of making jewellery itself, that’s why we are happy to be so selective.

All images are courtesy of Hemmerle