Profile: Disegno Fine Jewellery

Ground control to Major Disegno.

HOW OTTAWA’S PAMELA COULSTON CREATED THE FIRST JEWELLERY TO GO INTO OUTER SPACE.

Canadian pride soared in 1962 with the launch of Alouette 1 into the ionosphere. It was Canada's first satellite, and the first constructed by a country other than the Soviet Union or the United States. That made us the fourth country in space, five months following the British Ariel 1, but they needed the US and NASA to build theirs.

Not to be outdone again, Canada recently marked a big FIRST in Outer Space. It is an accomplishment that should be honoured with a ticker-tape parade down Murray Street, right past Disegno Fine Jewellery. Owner/ designer Pamela Coulston created pieces carried to the International Space Station by astronaut David Saint-Jacques, making her fine jewellery designs the first to leave the confines of Earth’s atmosphere. Take that, USSR, US, and UK!

Pamela launched Disegno in 1992, after studying jewellery design in California. She’d been living in Africa and on her return to Canada sought a new creative career. Her designs have been sold in public and private galleries, museums, exclusive cruise ships from the Arctic to the Antarctic and boutiques in Canada, the US, and Europe. Disegno went street retail 13 years ago in the Glebe but soon moved to the Market once the business took off. And, no wonder it did. While her designs are known for their simplicity (“actually, nothing is harder than ‘simple’ and ‘restrained’ when it comes to any design,” she contends), she’s a stickler for detail and quality. Disegno’s jewellery is handcrafted in platinum and in 18k yellow, white, and rose gold, but even more unusual is that Pamela is one of the very few designers in North America with a penchant for green gold. She’s even experimented with purple gold. Yes, really.

Pamela is a twice-accredited gemologist – highly regarded certifications in this trade – and her bold designs feature stunning natural and unusual gems. “I rarely use common and calibrated gems,” she says, “instead, I find the oddities and design the jewellery

David Saint-Jacques took cufflinks and a pendant of the Order of Canada into space . . . the Canadian Space Agency certified and framed the items and gave them back to Rideau Hall.

ABOVE CENTRE: Order of Canada Pendant in 18k gold with a natural Canadian diamond and cuflinks in solid sterling silver. Designed and produced by Pamela Couslston of Disegno Fine Jewellery and available for purchase by recipients of the Order of Canada.

to the gem. While I certainly design diamond jewellery, my love is coloured gems and the green gold makes the deeply saturated colours ‘pop’.” Again, no wonder she won a national competition to send original Canadian jewellery design into space.

Custom design is Pamela’s specialty, but she never imagined designing for the Governor General or the Canadian Space Agency (CSA). “I was requested to submit an entry. I stayed late at the boutique one Saturday night with a glass of wine and drew until the wee hours. I submitted it and promptly forgot all about it. Getting the call that I won came as quite the surprise.”

The commission required an interpretation of The Order of Canada motif into cufflinks and a convertible 14k gold pendant/broach set with – of course – a Canadian diamond. “Once again, it was about distilling the design down to the simplest, fewest elements needed to express the idea.”

Pamela Couslton

And so, up went Disegno’s very fine jewellery with astronaut David SaintJacques in December 2018. SaintJacques’ assignment on the ISS lasted 204 days, the longest ever by a Canadian. Between December and June 2019, he orbited the Earth 3,264 times covering a distance of 139,096,495 kilometers. During his mission, Saint-Jacques conducted Canadian and international science experiments and technology demonstrations, and supported critical operations and maintenance activities. He became the fourth CSA astronaut to conduct a spacewalk and the first CSA astronaut to use Canadarm2 to catch a visiting spacecraft.

On November 5, 2020, the CSA’s Communications and Public Affairs Directorate confirmed that, “Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques took cufflinks and a pendant of the Order of Canada into space. These items were brought back to Earth, the Canadian Space Agency certified and framed the items and gave them back to Rideau Hall.” That officially makes Ottawa's Pamela Coulston the first jewellery designer whose stellar creations have gone into space. Another landmark Canadian achievement!

Earthlings can see Pamela’s out-ofthis-world designs in her boutique at 100 Murray Street in the Market n

Farewell TO THE BYTOWNE CINEMA

After 32 years of operation, the independent ByTowne Cinema has been forced to close its doors due to numerous challenges related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Declining audiences and a smaller selection of films to show gave owner Bruce White no choice but to shut down the theatre on December 26, 2020.

“The ByTowne has a fantastic customer base, but many ByTowners just aren't coming these days, and I don't blame them: our staff have done an amazing job with COVID protocols that keep customers as safe as possible. Everyone's risk assessment is personal, and specific to their circumstances. Many just don't want to make a nonessential trip to a cinema,” White said in a farewell letter written on December 4, 2020.

The ByTowne was initially slated to close on December 31, after running a final ‘Best of the ByTowne’ series of 21 films from December 21 to 31. But the province-wide lockdown forced the theatre to close on boxing day.

Since the theatre has already sold 1050 tickets for the event, White has hopes that the remaining films can be showcased from February 26-March 7, 2021. Some of the scheduled films include Parasite, Metropolis and Stop Making Sense, the concert film the ByTowne showed when it first opened 32 years ago.

The Rideau Street theatre was formerly known as the Nelson Cinema, and was built by local entrepreneur Hyman Berlin during the fall and winter of 1946. When the theatre opened its doors on February 10, 1947, it had all the “modern conveniences” of the time, such as an air conditioning system, the very best in ‘terrazzo’ flooring, and 650 seats with capacity for 1,000 people. Berlin leased the theatre to Famous Players two years after its opening, and ran it for nearly 40 years.

When Famous Players no longer wanted to run single-screen cinemas in 1988, they moved out and the Berlin family sold the building. White, who had five years earlier purchased the Towne Cinema on Beechwood Avenue with business partner Jean Cloutier, decided to buy the Nelson and renamed it ByTowne. When the Towne’s lease was set to be renewed that year, the pair decided to let it lapse and focus on running their new theatre instead.

White says he had a “checkered cinema history” during his youth, having only seen two movies while in high school since his home town didn’t have a theatre. But he always enjoyed films, and his previous job designing Town cinema’s program guide gave him a path into the theatre industry.

White described the changes he made to the ByTowne theatre’s operations over the years as “evolutionary, not revolutionary” such as expanding its program guide, developing a website and installing a digital projector.

When the COVID-19 lockdown in March and April 2020 forced the ByTowne to shut its doors, White says it went from being a “reasonably profitable and successful business” to having zero revenue. The theatre had never been closed for more than 24 hours at a time, except for a weeklong shutdown in 2014 to install new seating.

When cinemas were allowed to reopen months later, public safety measures mandated that only a maximum of 50 physically-distanced people were permitted to gather at a time, regardless of the theatre’s size. This was a huge limitation on the revenue White could bring in, and with declining ticket sales the ByTowne began losing money every day.

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To make matters worse, distributors were releasing fewer films for theatres to show, and instead selling those titles directly to streaming services. “They were considering delaying those releases until more people could come to cinemas. Ultimately, I was faced with the prospect of having diminished audiences, and a product selection that was scraping the bottom of barrel,” White said.

When Ottawa went into a modified Stage 2 lockdown on October 10, White had hopes that guidelines would be modified to give movie theatres an increased seating capacity once they reopened. A month later, he was disappointed to see this was not the case.

“I wish that a bit more thought had been put into it. Clearly for a cinema that seats 100 people, a 50-person limit is a different than a cinema that seats 650 people. Percentages based on the size of theatres would have been more adaptable,” he said. became clear that until everybody was vaccinated, restrictions on theatres would remain and his business could not be financially viable. That was when he made the difficult choice to close it down.

For the next five months, White will be caring for the mothballed cinema and exploring various avenues of selling it. Since August 2019, White has been reaching out to various film societies and independent theatre operators to see who might be interested in purchasing the ByTowne. “I want to retire and sell my business to someone who can run a successful cinema, but right now nobody wants to buy it in order to offer 50 people a show at a time,” he said.

Looking back his time at the ByTowne, White said he’s had a lot of fun running the business and giving people from across Ottawa a place to enjoy movies. “It was always really gratifying to come into work and see the results of a previous night’s attendance, and confirm that people still enjoy real cinema. That’s a been a great thing.” n

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