About
One bench, since 1998.
A short account of how the studio works and why it has stayed small, written without the usual biography.
The engraver.
Trained in a silversmithing workshop, then five years cutting armorials for a trade house that never put a name to anything it made. That is where the habit of silence came from, and it turned out to be the more useful part of the apprenticeship.
The studio opened in 1998 with one bench and a referral list of eleven people. The bench count has not changed.
Everything that leaves here is cut by the same hands that quoted it. There is no workshop behind this page, no overflow arrangement, and no version of the studio that gets busy and quietly hands your piece to somebody else.
A studio that can take every commission it is offered is a studio that is not choosing.
Principles
- Small on purpose
Roughly forty commissions a year. Turning work away is what makes the remaining work good.
- No apprentice work
Every cut on a client's piece is made by the engraver. Practice happens on scrap, in the evening, on the studio's own time.
- Say no early
If a piece is better served by another method, another maker, or by being left alone, we will say so at the consultation and not after the deposit.
- Hand and machine both
Refusing to use a laser out of principle costs the client depth accuracy they should have had. Using one where a graver belongs costs them everything else.
- Documentation over memory
Condition reports, drawings and proofs exist so a disagreement can be settled by looking rather than by recollection.
Standing arrangements
- Members of the trade invoiced net thirty; private clients on deposit and balance
- Insured specialist transit arranged both ways as standard
- On-site work available for collections that cannot travel
- Existing clients may refer without asking us first
- Consultations by encrypted call where travel is impractical
- The studio closes for two weeks in August and does not queue work through it
Work begins with a conversation.
The studio takes a limited number of commissions each quarter. Enquiries are read by the engraver, not by an assistant.
Request an appointmentRead the discretion policy