Some people may call Nathalie Jean a perfectionist, but she would take the description one step further—she’s a control freak, and that’s why she’s perfectly suited to be a jewelry designer, Jean says.

The former architect and interior designer founded her eponymous jewelry brand in 1998, drawn by the idea of realizing her designs from start to finish, something she couldn’t do when working on someone else’s project. And she wanted a smaller-scale art form than architecture—as an architect in her native Canada, she’d designed skyscrapers and museums.

Yet when you look at her jewelry collections, you see the influence of her architecture background: the angularity of Saphir, the precision of Circuit, the movement of Mercure. And they are detailed as the interiors and furniture she helped design when she moved to Milan for a new line of work.

The key to Jean’s satisfaction with her current role is that she can see a piece from initial concept to completion in a truly hands-on way. Jean’s jewelry is artistically derived, small production, and limited edition—all purposeful choices stemming from an experience that stirred her interest in designing jewelry.

“I was visiting a friend’s studio in Marrakech, I think in 1996. His assistant was making silver jewelry. I was a bit fed up with architecture at that point, and tired because I was working all over the world,” Jean says.

“I was fascinated by this guy making such beautiful things with his hands, a flame, and his primitive tools. I thought that this is what I want to do. No more clients to listen to, no more contractors to yell at, just pure creation. It was somebody making jewelry rather than somebody wearing jewelry.”

When she was growing up, “my family was not into jewelry at all,” Jean says. “I don’t remember any piece of jewelry of any member of my family, except maybe my mother’s engagement ring—nothing special—and my dad’s wedding band, which was yellow gold and quite heavy, and which he used to spin on the kitchen table like a throttle.”

Jean was born and raised in Montreal, the second of four children. Her father was a professor and researcher in medical genetics, and Jean says she got a passion for science from him. She used to accompany her dad to work and help out. She recalls “nights in his lab, isolating chromosomes with a super advanced technique for the time, so that his staff could make karyotype sheets in the morning.”

For her last two years in high school, Jean attended Lycée Périer in Marseilles, France, where her father was doing a sabbatical. She went back to Canada for college, graduating from the University of Montreal in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture.

After two years as an architect in Montreal, Jean moved to Milan to work with Ettore Sottsass. Following the birth of her daughter, she opened her own interior design studio in 1994, with mostly fashion brands as her clients. One of them, coincidentally, was fine jewelry house Pomellato.

That Marrakech moment in 1996 led to her new life’s purpose. She learned how to make jewelry and bought a workshop in Milan from an old jeweler who was retiring. She quit architecture and interior design entirely as she began selling her own jewelry pieces and designing jewelry for fashion companies (which she still does today).

Initiating the creative process and keeping her production on an atelier-like small scale are important to Jean as an artist and person.

“For me, luxury is synonym of rarity—when you are 100% sure that you will never come across somebody wearing the same piece as you. The opposite of mass-market,” she says.

“I don’t look at jewelry at all for inspiration, everything I make comes from within, my personal experiences, what I see, and what I learn from nature, mathematics, linguistics, microbiology.”

Top: Nathalie Jean moved from architecture and interior design into jewelry so she could work more with her hands and control the process from start to finish. (Photos courtesy of Nathalie Jean)

• Subscribe to the JCK News Daily
• Subscribe to the JCK Special Report
• Follow JCK on Instagram: @jckmagazine
• Follow JCK on X: @jckmagazine
• Follow JCK on Facebook: @jckmagazine