Services
Restoration & Repair
Recutting worn ornament, filling and reworking damage, and matching the hand of an engraver long dead.
Making good without making it new.
Most restoration work arrives worn rather than broken. A hundred and fifty years of pockets and polishing cloths round the edges of a cut until the ornament reads as a soft grey ghost. The question is never whether we can sharpen it. It is how much of the original we are willing to lose.
The default is conservative: recut only what has gone illegible, leave the rest, and accept a visible difference in crispness between old and new. A piece that has been fully recut everywhere looks like a reproduction, because functionally it is one.
Where a monogram must be changed, we do it by insert rather than by cutting away. A matched panel is let in, levelled, and cut fresh. Done properly the joint disappears under a loupe and the surrounding original work is untouched.
Scope of work
- Recutting worn ornament and monograms
- Laser welding and levelling before recut
- Let-in panels for changed ciphers
- Erasure and reworking of altered marks
- Hallmark-adjacent work under strict rules
- Written condition report before any cutting
Working notes
The details that decide whether a piece is right or merely finished.
- First step
Photographic record and a written condition report. Nothing is cut until the client has seen both.
- Matching a hand
Existing cuts are measured for angle, width and spacing, then practised on scrap until the new work reads as the same engraver.
- Hallmarks
Assay marks are never touched, recut or worked around in any way that could be read as interference.
- Reversibility
Where a choice exists, we take the option that leaves a future conservator more to work with, not less.
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