Andrew Grima

Francesca Grima is the London based designer and curator of GRIMA - the most important jewellery brand that you might not have heard of.

Francesca Grima is quietly spoken; she allows her work to announce itself. Her jewellery stimulates the senses - to experience not just the sight, but also the tactile physicality of her stunning, somehow otherworldly creations is to become enchanted, as Francesca presents first a pair of boulder opal earrings (2018) with gold coiled clips (£11,800), then the 'Gherkin' ring (2017) in homage to one of Francesca's favourite buildings, a dome of triangular faceted lapis lazuli with matching faceted gold shank which merges computer aided design and manufacture with hand finishing (£9,000). There follows a large ring carved out of solid tear shaped agate surmounted by diamonds, and then yet another made out of white agate and gold, the Yayoi Kusama-inspired 'Dot' ring (2016). And so it continues - at the mention of a particular stone, yet another selection arrives: a further tray of exquisite artistry at which one can only marvel.

Francesca runs a thoroughly modern business. Commissions and sales are largely sourced via social media and the Grima website, and she also exhibits at leading art fairs and by appointment. Thirty to forty new pieces are created annually. These join Grima pieces from every decade of the last half century, about which Francesca is expertly knowledgeable. Because of course, the Grima story began many years before.

Auric Goldfinger notwithstanding, the man with the real-life Midas touch in the 1960s was Francesca's father, Andrew Grima. Charismatic, handsome and the epitome of style, Andrew had something of a 60's James Bond aura about him - even his company car was (naturally!) an Aston Martin DB5.

Andrew Grima was born in Rome, his mother a scion of the Farnese family, his Maltese father an embroidery designer. The family settled in London in 1926, when he was five. After serving as an engineer in the army (R.E.M.E), he joined his future father-in-law's jewellery manufacturing company as bookkeeper - an occupation for which he was not long destined. In 1948 “two dealer brothers arrived at our offices with a suitcase of large Brazilian stones - aquamarines, citrines, tourmalines and rough amethysts in quantities I had never seen before. I persuaded my father-in-law to buy the entire collection and I set to work designing. This was the beginning of my career”.

With a talent for drawing but without any design or gemmology training, Grima was unencumbered by convention and didn't want his jewellery to look like the established jewellery of the day. Fifty years previously, the 'Belle Epoque' style had created a vogue for white diamonds set in platinum. In the 20s & 30s, Fulco di Verdura (then jewellery designer for Coco Chanel), inspired by Byzantine mosaics, advanced coloured cabochon stones set in polished gold. But Grima went further. He left rocks raw, large and rough, eschewed claw settings and favoured matt, natural (almost native) textured gold. Grima wanted his futuristic jewellery to be fun and to be actually worn, not to be so intrinsically valuable that it either needed its own security guard or to be kept locked in a safe. He therefore favoured semi-precious stones and used small diamonds only for accents. Grima continued experimenting until 1961 when he exhibited six designs in the landmark 'International Exhibition of Modern Jewellery, 1890 - 1961' at Goldsmiths Hall. These new, wearable works of art successfully captured the flamboyance of the age, and immediately brought Grima a great deal of attention.

Princess Margaret's Lichen brooch

Style guru Lord Snowdon had lately written a newspaper piece lamenting the state of UK Jewellery design. Ever the shrewd businessman, Grima spotted an opportunity and invited Snowdon to visit his studio. Suitably impressed, Snowdon purchased presents for his wife, Princess Margaret. As his star ascended, Grima became the only jeweller ever to win the Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for Elegant Design. So taken was the Prince that he bought a carved ruby and diamond brooch in textured wire from the 1966 collection. It's almost starfish design has the central carved ruby surrounded with gold and diamonds and a further five carved rubies recycled from an Indian headdress. A Royal Warrant from H.M. Queen Elizabeth II followed in 1970. In total the Royal Family acquired over one hundred Grima creations, mostly as diplomatic gifts. These included the 'textured wire' brooch (an innovative signature technique requiring each wire element to be soldered to the next) with citrine starburst, given to Mme Pompidou by the Queen on a state visit to France in 1972, and the United States Bicentennial brooch, which again focuses on the Queen's cypher, given to Betty Ford in 1976.

The Queen's ruby brooch

1966 also saw Grima open his first shop at no. 80 Jermyn Street. It was designed by his architect brothers, George and Godfrey. The shopfront was a large screen designed by sculptor Bryan Kneale R.A., formed from slabs of Welsh slate on a steel frame. It was typical of Grima to select a textured natural material and use it in a new and innovative manner. The massive cast aluminium door was designed by Geoffrey Clarke R.A. Inside, a Perspex spiral staircase, the first of its type, led down to the basement. For the reticent and staid community of gentlemen's outfitters, the arrival of such a brash and sexy newcomer must have been a real shock. Lord Snowdon was at the opening party and the shop quickly became the grooviest jewellery playground and society hub. London and the second Elizabethan Age were in full swing, and musicians, artists and actors mixed with aristocrats, royalty, financiers and retail magnates. Visitors included Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink, Sir Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers. Jewels were endlessly borrowed and featured in magazines such as Vogue.

At the height of Grima's popularity, over sixty goldsmiths based in Shaftesbury Avenue, were producing fifteen hundred pieces a year. In 1966 Grima won 'The Queen's Award to Industry (for export achievement)', and by the early 1970s 75% of production was sold abroad, earning Grima £180,000 in foreign exchange, more than all his British rivals put together. America was the largest single market and Jackie Kennedy was a client. Around the turn of the decade, Grima observed “I think that the types of people that buy my jewellery are in fact people who collect art; sculpture, paintings. Obviously with a certain amount of thought towards the future value, for investment, but this isn't their prime concern”.

Andrew Grima always incorporated nature into his work. He developed a technique of placing found organics in a can, filling it with plaster of paris and then heating it in a kiln so that the organic material burns away to nothing.  Molten gold is then spun into the resulting negative space (originally a technique used in making gold false teeth) and the plaster then washed away, leaving an exact gold replica of the original. In 1967 Princess Margaret sent Grima some lichen that she had found at Balmoral. In only a week, Grima produced a gold lichen brooch with tiny diamond dewdrops, which he duly sold to the Princess for a token £1.

In 1969, Grima was commissioned by Omega to create the 'About Time' collection - a daring and outrageous array of 86 one-off pieces including 55 watches (plus matching jewellery) fashioned by 64 craftsmen, each making one piece from beginning to end. These were effectively bracelets and pendants, displaying a watch face behind a precious or semi-precious jewel 'glass'. The stones were cut in Idar Oberstein, and the Omega movement was fitted in Switzerland. The collection was launched at Goldsmiths Hall in 1969, opened by Princess Anne. Invited to choose one piece for herself, the Princess chose 'Elegance' - a wide stepped, textured, almost 'brutalist' bracelet with offset watch hands viewed through a rectangular smoky quartz. 'About Time' was first shown at Expo '70 in Osaka before being exhibited around the world - with the proviso that only one of each design could be purchased per continent. It speaks volumes for the culture of the age that 'Greenland', an irregular shaped textured yellow gold cuff with an irregular pink tourmaline glass, retailed at £6,000 - a crazy sum for a watch in the early 1970s. (Andrew Grima's own watch, a heavily textured case with a rectangular cut citrine 'glass' on a leather strap entitled 'Teak', is worn by Francesca today.)

'Elegance' watch

As chief designer and salesman, Andrew Grima spent half the year circling the globe, chasing sales and sourcing rare and unusual gems in Africa, Brazil and Australia. initially he sold through foreign department stores (including Seibu in Japan) and major jewellers. Both Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels would stock Grima pieces for clients who favoured his style. In 1970, Grima opened an Australian outlet in Rose Bay, Sydney, and in 1971 catered to his burgeoning customer base in America with his first New York gallery, in Georg Jensen's store on Madison Avenue. In 1974 Grima opened in Zurich, in a store again designed by his architect brothers; this façade being made from the textured hull of an old clipper ship.

In the ensuing years, success followed success. Grima expanded his design ideas through a succession of themed collections, referenced to this day in subsequent Grima jewellery. The 'Opal & Pearl' collection - which saw Grima break with the ideal of perfectly round and matched pearls in favour of irregular-shaped 'Baroque' pearls in a mix of colours - was launched on December 7th1970. 1971 saw 'Rock Revival', a collection based upon the idea that nature's works of art - chosen for colour, form and texture above intrinsic value - were unimprovable, and that Grima's task was simply to frame them in gold. 1972's 'Supershells' was a collection of jewellery and objects d'art incorporating shells studded with precious stones or highlighted with diamonds. For 1973's 'Sticks & Stones' Grima went to Brazil and found crystal sticks. In 1974 'A Tale of Tahiti' featured large South Sea and Tahitian cultured pearls. In 1976 Grima designed a collection of watches for Pulsar, the inventors of the digital watch. In keeping with the revolutionary mechanism, it simply needed a touch to the case to activate the red L.E.D. display.

Andrew Grima was now arguably the greatest modernist jewellery designer. But tastes and markets changed as the UK economy worsened. Buyers now wanted multiples and large, impressive precious stones in claw settings over radical design. The nadir came in 1986 when a new business association collapsed. Grima resigned his Royal Warrant and closed the London shop, opening another in Lugano, Switzerland. In 1992 the family moved to Gstaad, where Andrew opened his last shop and continued to design until his death.  

The Goldsmiths Company, which had formed a major collection of Grima Jewellery, held a major retrospective in 1991 to mark his 70th birthday. Around the same time, the Brutalist style of mid-century modern architecture, which featured hammered and textured concrete and had come to be regarded as 'a bit naff', started to be re-evaluated - and so it was with Grima jewellery.

In 2007, the Queen unwittingly paid the designer a prescient yet fitting tribute by wearing her much-loved Grima ruby brooch for her Christmas broadcast. Andrew Grima died the following day, aged 86. In 2012 Francesca's mother JoJo and Francesca moved the business back to London, and the Grima revival has gathered pace ever since. In 2015 a 2.97 carat step-cut greyish-blue diamond and sapphire gold-mounted ring (1971) set the record for a piece of Grima jewellery, selling for £1,482,500 (including premium) at Bonhams. Two years later, Bonhams sold some 55 pieces - the largest collection of Grima jewellery ever to come to market - for record prices.  My personal favourite from the auction was the whimsical cast 'Pencil Shavings' brooch; a gold rosette brooch highlighted with diamonds (1968), which sold for £17,500. Famous collectors today include designers Marc Jacobs and Miuccia Prada.

Grima today is distinct from many jewellery houses in that it does not recreate archived designs. But there is one notable exception: the 'Lei' (a Polynesian garland of flowers) necklace inspired by the waves off Hawaii. Jo-Jo Grima commissioned the original goldsmith, now in his late seventies, to recreate it fifty years after the original, and it took a full two years to complete. This fabulously intricate piece is fashioned out thousands of elements of yellow gold 'textured wire', subsequently engraved, and finished with a scattering of diamonds. The original was modelled by Ursula Andress and won a De Beers Diamonds International Award in 1966 (Grima won three in 1964 and ultimately collected twelve, more than any other designer before or since).

Detail of 'Lei' necklace

Francesca's own designs are often less textured and simpler than her father's, but with such a broad and rich heritage of design concepts she is not trapped or daunted. Francesca passionately aims to maintain Grima's reputation for excellence and exclusivity.