Black Mark

Famed as owners of one of the world’s largest black diamonds, Maison Korloff is on a mission to make its mark across the world, as CEO Bassam Azakir outlines

WORDS: JOHN THATCHER

While legacy jewellery brands can lean on more than a century of history to help chart their future course, Maison Korloff – relatively young having been founded by the Lyon-born diamond dealer Daniel Paillasseur in 1978 – has the extraordinary as its compass; an 88-carat black diamond, among the world’s largest and considered priceless.

“The Korkoff black diamond is more than emblematic of the house, it is its soul, its source of inspiration,” states the maison’s CEO, Bassam Azakir. “To understand why, you need to know where it comes from and its legend.”

A lso referred to as carbonado (a Portuguese word meaning ‘burned’), black diamonds differ by lacking traces of minerals found deep in the Earth's mantle, typical of other diamonds. One proposed theory is that they are formed in supernova explosions – when a dying star literally bows out with a bang –with chunks of the material ultimately falling to Earth, their unusual properties pre-formed. As such, carbonados are estimated to date from between 2.6 to 3.8 billion years ago.

T he origin of Korloff’s black diamond is a 200-carat chunk of carbonado, discovered in Brazil during the nineteenth centuty. “It was acquired by the Korloff-Sapojnikoff family, members of the Russian nobility,” continues Azakir. “Mysterious and fascinating, endowed with a powerful magnetism, the gem has been passed down like a talisman through the generations. With the revolution that took down the Tsarist regime, the family sought refuge in Europe, where its members escaped the horrors taking place in their country of origin. The black diamond became synonymous with renewed luck and happiness, and later cast its spell on Daniel Paillasseur, who acquired it.”

O ver the course of eighteen months, Paillasseur had the diamond cut to eighty-eight carats, a size specifically chosen due to the ‘lucky’ connotations of the number eight in Chinese numerology.

It certainly brought good fortune to Paillasseur. “He christened the black diamond ‘Korloff,’ in honour of its former owners, and established the eponymous house of fine jewellery and diamonds,” tells Azakir, who became company CEO in 2018 after working first as its International Sales Manager, then Associate Director.

Helping to plant the brand’s footprint in more than 40 countries, Beirutborn Azakir’s most recent step towards Maison Korloff “conquering the world, near and far, as is our priority,” was to open its reimagined store in The Dubai Mall, under the management of the Chalhoub Group.

“ We are proud to bring our exceptional and unique collections to the region. The Middle East is a vast region that encompasses many different cultures, traditions, and languages. It offers great opportunities for those who make the effort to understand its complex marketing landscape, which is exactly what Maison Korloff has done to be successful.

“

It’s also one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, and especially attractive for luxury brands because of the region’s increasing spend on luxury goods, compared to more mature markets such as Europe, Japan, and the United States. One important fact to note about this region is its young demographic, with almost fifty per cent of the population under the age of 25.”

It's a fact that has not gone unnoticed at Maison Korloff. “A few years ago, we refreshed the brand, with a revised logo and a brighter, more welcoming boutique concept. New collections and global campaigns were also designed to appeal to young people.

“ This younger generation of clients is continuing to cause a massive shift across all markets. By modernising the brand and its universe, we aim to make a deeper connection with them through our exceptional design and craftsmanship.”

K orloff’s new collections are certainly contemporary. The Eclat collection is inspired by the architectural lines of the Louvre’s pyramid tip, the boldly designed pieces in the Korlove collection feature 18k white and pink gold, while the colourful Saint-Petersbourg range utilises diamonds, onyx, lacquer, and motherof-pearl to offset striking agate.

Yet diamonds remain at the heart of Korloff, the brand even having its own unique cuts: one octagonal in shape with 73 facets, the other a more traditional brilliant cut, but with 88 facets instead of the typical 57. There is also a bespoke service. “We take pride in providing our discerning clients with the opportunity to have their jewellery designed and crafted to their exact specifications, bringing their vision to life,” says Azakir.

O ne area where the younger generation stand apart is consumer habits. Does Azakir feel that Korloff’s clients are now more conscious about the sourcing and sustainability aspects of a stone? “Of course, they are, and we fully respect this growing consciousness,” he says. “We do have a responsibility and are equally aware that it is a process [to implement sustainable practice] that will not happen overnight. But we are ready to start our journey to sustainability, and our next high jewellery collection will be crafted from Fairminded gold. Other sustainability initiatives are also on the way.”

A s for what else the future holds for Korloff, Azakir knows it will be inextricably linked to its legendary black diamond. “It’s a treasure, and we have the ambition to capitalize on it in the upcoming years.”

Timekeepers

In only a decade, Struthers Watchmakers have become a sensation, with both their handmade watches and expert restoration in high demand

WORDS: TRACEY LLEWELLYN

Tucked away in the Churnet Valley in England, affectionately known as Little Switzerland for its hilly landscape, is the Struthers Watchmakers studio. Within this 350sq ft workshop in the market town of Leek is a combined 40 years’ experience in watch restoration, watchmaking, goldsmithing, silversmithing, fine art, gemmology and design.

Last year the company founders, Craig and Rebecca Struthers, celebrated 10 years in business, as well as their 10th wedding anniversary. In only a decade, they have become a sensation in the world of horology, with order books full for their own handmade watches, and a waiting list stretching into many months for their restoration work.

“Watchmakers like Craig and me are a rare breed,” explains Rebecca in her new book, Hands of Time. “In 2012 we set up on our own, becoming one of just a handful of firms in the UK with the skills to make mechanical watches from scratch and to restore antique watches from the last five centuries.”

Unsurprisingly, both disciplines need the same skills: “If you’re a proper watchmaker, you are capable of making parts, and in restoration you have to make parts,” says Craig. “Some of our best watchmakers, people like the late George Daniels, started out in restoration. When you restore, you are handling centuries of design and you can use that to inform your own work.”

They’re so busy because it is increasingly difficult to find good watch restorers. There are few formal courses in restoration techniques, and not enough restorers have the time to take on and train apprentices. Plus starting salaries for those servicing modern watches are usually much higher than in the antiques trade, so the reasons for the shortage become obvious.

Nevertheless, old watches have become highly sought after, compounding the problem. “Watches sell at auction, someone has a tinker with them and they end up in an even worse state and back in another auction,” Craig says. “As a result, over the past 10 years the overall condition of vintage watches has gone down. People buy them, decide not to get them repaired because they can’t find anyone to do the job or because

These pages, clockwise from left: front and back of The Carter; Craig and Rebecca Struthers, by Andy Pilsbury; The Carter Next pages, clockwise from left: the workshop, by Andy Pilsbury; The Kingsley MKII; The Kingsley it is too expensive, and sell them on. It’s creating a downward cycle.”

Discovering their shared love of old over new, while students at Birmingham City University — Craig in horology and Rebecca originally in goldsmithing, before moving on to watchmaking — the Strutherses separately moved to London after graduating, working for auction houses, restoring, and watch dealing. During this time, they worked with restorer Steven Hale — then on

George Street, now on South Molton Street and in Bushey, near Watford, and experienced what they refer to as “another level of training,” working on early Rolexes, carriage clocks and rare military watches.

In 2012, when the idea arose to start up on their own, they moved back to Birmingham and set up shop in the Jewellery Quarter, which remained their home until last year, when the rural calm of Staffordshire persuaded them to make another move.

“We started out doing restoration only, specialising in pre-1960s watches,” says Craig. “Our clients came from contacts in the auction houses, and slowly word started to spread. Building a reputation in watchmaking is very different from other businesses; it takes a decade plus to get anywhere.”

In fact, recognition came surprisingly quickly for the couple in an industry that is notoriously slow paced.

In 2013 the Strutherses won a Design Innovation Award for their pendant watch Stella — a singlehand timepiece housed in an orb of rock crystal suspended within a platinum gimbal and based around a 1960s heritage movement.

Rebecca sighs at the memory of Stella. We just had to submit a design,” she says, “and we never really thought we stood any chance. But a few months later we got a phone call to let us know we’d won and we realised we’d have to make this thing. It was a steep learning curve: we’d never made a case before and we initially thought we would just find a casemaker to work with. Then we realised that there really aren’t many independent casemakers left. So, we had to teach ourselves — as well as how to work with platinum. And everything had to be done in 10 weeks. We got back from the awards saying, ‘Never ever again.’ But then we got over it and thought, ‘Actually we can do it again, and we can do it better.’”

Since then, the Strutherses have gone on to hand-make several small collections with salvaged and restored movements bought from bullion dealers who scrap the cases for gold and discard the movement within. They have also made their own movement, Project 248, which will power a very small run of bespoke watches with six-figure prices to be delivered over the next decade — all already preordered. But the heart of the business remains restoration and the joy gained from working on objects that contain decades, or centuries, of history.

Like the trays and drawers of salvaged movements, the antique tools in the Strutherses’ workshop have been lovingly rehomed, coming from all around the world via eBay or offered to the pair following a media appearance. “We try to name the tool after the person it belonged to,” says Craig. “Also, as there’s only the two of us in the workshop — three if you count Archie our Staffie watchdog — the tools are like our team, so they all deserve a name.”

The old machinery is ideal for restoration since modern tools are more suited to large-scale production. “I want to come into work and see a museum of old stuff that we actually use,” says Rebecca. “That is a lovely thing.”

Currently on the Struthers workbench is a little CH Meylan art nouveau pendant watch in platinum decorated with flowers and set with emeralds. Previous attempts at restoration had resulted in a missing stone being replaced with dyed green resin. “I managed to pick all that out without damaging the delicate settings,” says Rebecca. “And we found a Birmingham-based lapidarist who matched and cut the stone.

“There are very few people in the world with this level of skill; he’s one of the last in the Jewellery Quarter. Our setter is way past retirement age, and even his ‘apprentice’ is in his 50s. He did an amazing job. It’s hard finding people with the skills to match what they were making in the 1920s and ‘30s — back then it was the norm.” With the case finished, the pair are starting to work on the movement, which has a broken winding stem and hairspring. Replacement parts are no longer available, so Craig and Rebecca will have to make them from scratch.

“We’ve just finished the restoration of a chronograph. It wasn’t anything special, but we were the fourth watchmaker that had seen it,” says Craig. “Every time somebody took it in, it came back in a worse condition with missing parts.

“Most ‘watchmakers’ today are qualified for modern servicing, and while they may think, ‘I can do chronographs, I’ll give it a go’, vintage pieces are completely different beasts. Unless you have the patience and are willing to start learning from scratch, you won’t be able to do it. There are idiosyncrasies that you have to understand to get an antique movement to work properly. Working on so many old watches, we understand the different mechanisms — the strangest of set-ups is almost normal to us.”

Hands of Time: A Watchmaker’s History of Time by Rebecca Struthers (Hodder & Stoughton) is out now

Succession has made Nicholas Braun one of TV’s hottest stars, and as the final series of the Roy family drama wraps this month, the actor talks about the unassuming power of Cousin Greg

WORDS: HADLEY FREEMAN

Before meeting me in a bar in midtown New York one Saturday evening, Nicholas Braun spends the afternoon mooching around the Gagosian gallery and drinking cocktails with none other than… Matthew Macfadyen. That’s right, Cousin Greg and Tom Wambsgans from Succession — the bromance that brings light relief to the show’s dark heart — are even closer in real life than on screen.

“God, I love Matthew,” Braun, 34, says in a tone that comes perilously close to soppy. “I just feel extremely close to him — when we finished shooting the last season I sobbed saying goodbye. It’s still hard to get through a scene with him without laughing.”

Even though Braun and Macfadyen spent their every working hour staring into each other’s eyes as they shot Succession’s fourth and final series, they couldn’t bear to be parted over the weekend. “I haven’t been to a museum since I don’t even remember. But we wanted to hang, so this was the activity, and then we went to Bemelmans,” Braun says, referring to the iconic Upper East Side bar. (Sidenote: Sam Rockwell was also on this perfect-sounding date. But seeing as he is not part of the GregTom affair we can just ignore him.)

The question of who will take over the Roy family business is the central question of Succession, and when the last series ended it looked like Tom and Greg were joining forces to seize power together: the ultimate Tom-Greg fantasy. They were both duly nominated for an outstanding supporting actor in a drama series Emmy, and last September when they went to the ceremony — well, probably best to let Braun tell this.

“Matthew’s and my hands were on each other’s legs when the nominees were getting read out,” he says.

I’m sorry — your hands were where?

“ Yes, and, like, we were looking at each other, squeezing each other’s legs when our names got read aloud. Then when he won, I got to be the first person to give him a hug. And then his wife.”

So is Macfadyen’s wife, actress Keeley Hawes, jealous of this romance between the two of them, I ask, possibly a bit too excitedly.

“Uhh, no. No, no, no,” he says looking at me as if I’m a bit unhinged. Well, it wasn’t me who was just talking about gazing into Macfadyen’s eyes while feeling up his leg, Nicholas. Since it launched in 2018, Succession, the HBO drama about the Roy family, a fictional mega-rich media dynasty, has been a critical and commercial blockbuster, with the writers and cast dominating every TV awards show ever since. And deservedly so, because they are all terrific, from Brian Cox’s furious swearing as the patriarch, Logan, to Jeremy Strong’s tortured angst as the eldest son, Kendall. But it’s Braun as Cousin Greg who has really endeared himself to audiences, making an instant star out of the former jobbing actor, to the point that when he met Steven Spielberg, Spielberg cried: “I can’t believe I’m meeting Cousin Greg!”

Braun had actually been acting since he was a kid but was so tired of depressing auditions and failed pilots that he was on the verge of focusing instead on music with his brother, and then he was cast in the show. When I ask Jesse Armstrong, the British writer who created Succession, how he knew Braun was right for the character of Greg, he says: “Nick had that comforting thing for a comedy writer of nailing every comic beat available, but also brought his own rhythms, winkling out extra comedy and pathos.”

Now the man who has been described by the New York Post as “NYC’s hottest bachelor” has his moves around the city feverishly followed by female fans. “He asked me for sugar and I could barely respond,” one sighed on a celeb-spotting site.

A las this bachelor does now have a girlfriend. “I shouldn’t mention it,” he says, even though he was the one who brought her up. “But it’s really a special thing we got going on.” (He eventually concedes that she’s “super creative” and wants to be a producer.)

Yet despite being a very alpha 6ft

7in and sought after by women across Manhattan, Braun does not carry himself like the millennial Mr Big. He hunches and contorts himself so much that when he’s filming the other actors don’t need to stand on boxes to be at his eye level, even though some are a foot shorter than him. “I do a lot of leaning,” he says. You’ll be riddled with slipped discs by the time you’re 40, I say.

“ Yeah, I know!” he says, looking stricken. “I had, like, a posture strap. But, um, yeah… ” he trails off. On Succession Greg is the hopeless outsider and Braun comes across as a bit Gregish in this bar, Pebble, to be honest. He partly owns it, yet when we arrive the staff don’t even know his name. (“It’s Nick?” he says with Greg’s upward-tick intonation.) When he then orders food — “I’ll have the devilled eggs?” — it takes enormous self-restraint not to make a reference to “Greg the egg”, the belittling nickname used by the Roys. In his very dress-down outfit of a hoodie and jeans Braun seems about as out of place in this swanky three-storey bar, with its retro dark wood and expensive furniture, as Greg is among the Roys. (Mark Ronson is another investor in Pebble, which makes more sense.)

In fact Braun has become something of a hotspot magnate. It started when he was on “a big night with a buddy of mine, [the New York hospitality impresario] Jon Neidich”, he says, and Neidich mentioned, at 3am, that he was opening a bar. “And I was, like, ‘Dude, you gotta tell me when you’re starting bars, man,’ obviously like a hundred drinks into it. And he’s like, ‘Do you want in on this one?’ ‘Yeah!’ And we shook on it right there.” Trying in vain to suppress memories of Greg getting wasted at Tom’s bleak bachelor party, I ask if he regretted shaking on anything at 3am.

“No, I checked it out the next morning and it was great,” he says. This was the Lower East Side dive bar Ray’s, which has become downtown’s celebrity hangout, with Gigi Hadid, Zoë Kravitz and ASAP Rocky all spotted there. This was followed by the stylishly retro deli S&P, on 5th Avenue, then Pebble. “I don’t know. I think it was, like, always a cool dream. Like, ‘Be great to have a bar some day.’ ”

Braun grew up in Connecticut and New York, commuting between his divorced parents’ homes. His father, Craig Braun, a Grammy-winning record sleeve designer, helped Andy Warhol with