In the mid-2010s, Nathalie Mathoulin was working as a freelance designer and raising two young children.
Her daughter, Mia, and her son, Raphaël, treasured things that they would find outdoors such as conkers, the British term for horse chestnuts; stray confetti; and pebbles. “Children are closer to the ground — they notice the minute and the micro,” said Ms. Mathoulin, now 51.
They “were the ones showing me the way of looking at stones,” natural elements that in 2017 became the focus of her namesake jewelry line, a collection of unisex earrings, pendants, necklaces and rings.
Ms. Mathoulin grew up in Le Chesnay, near Versailles, and studied fashion at École Duperré, a public college of art and design in Paris. She worked as a designer for the Spanish shoe company Camper and then, from 2002 to 2011, as a shoe designer for Paul Smith, a British designer.
Mr. Smith’s longtime motto was “You can find inspiration in everything (and if you can’t, look again).” It was something she was still telling herself in 2014, she recalled, when a 5-year-old Raphaël presented her with a dime-size piece of ombré flint that he called a “rainbow rock.”
It was pretty — with rings of brown, red, pink and purple — and she kept it on her desk. A couple of years later, when she decided to have the rock set in gold for a necklace, the goldsmiths she approached “were not interested because I was showing them a pebble.”
But, “if you can do this with a diamond, you can do this with a pebble,” she said, and finally she found one in London that was willing.
She had been designing similar pieces for friends, and became increasingly attracted to the contrast between high-karat gold and garden-variety stones.
“I think it’s an instinct to pick up stones and put them on,” she said, adding that “Personal Ornaments in Prehistory,” a 2019 book by Emma L. Baysal, an archaeologist, about the fashioning of jewelry through the early Bronze Age, also has been a particular influence on her work.
In the kitchen of her home and studio in the London suburb of Wimbledon, Ms. Mathoulin pulled out several drawers holding the kind of found materials showcased in her jewelry: lighthouse lenses from Dungeness, England, that were discarded and became sea glass; and stones from a beach near Biarritz, France, that “look just like caramel,” she said.
She does not cut, polish or otherwise recondition the pieces: “They come the way they are — mis en valeur,” with their best features brought out.
That natural aspect appealed to Molly Nutter, who began offering Ms. Mathoulin’s jewelry in October at the boutique ByGeorge in Austin, Texas: “She’s not trying to make them slick or flashy, and that struck a chord in me.”
Ms. Mathoulin’s work also is available at several boutiques in the United States as well as M.II, a new, second shop opened by the retailer Mouki mou in London. Later this month, they plan to debut a capsule collection, made with pebbles and a limpet that the shop’s founder, Maria Lemos, gathered on Patmos, Greece.
About a third of Ms. Mathoulin’s jewelry uses stones, shells and sea glass sent to her by clients for commissioned pieces. “Mostly, they’ve found them on walks with people they love,” she said.
In April 2024, for example, Heather Veitch and her teenage daughter spent two and a half days combing Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan for interesting rocks. Ms. Veitch, a Maine resident, sent an edit of their haul to Ms. Mathoulin, who designed two 18-karat gold pendants — for mother and daughter — and an 18-karat gold necklace for the mother. Each one, Ms. Veitch said, is a “totem of what that trip meant to us.”
Friends also give her things to use — a shark tooth, for example, that Ms. Mathoulin turned into an earring. She had it hung from its sharp tip on a gold wire, accenting the root area with antique black pearls.
As for self-sourced stones, Ms. Mathoulin regards Wimbledon Common — a green space rich in pebbled paths — as her local hunting ground.
During a recent walk there, she noted that the best time to hunt for pebbles is after a rainstorm, and it had rained recently. As Ms. Mathoulin bent down to pick up a dark-red stone with a pinkish interior that resembled a withered wild strawberry, she said, “Today is a very good day.”
She also bent to pick up a smooth mouse-gray pebble shaped like an egg. “Time is precious,” she added. “Therefore, this is precious.”
All these elements are routed through her kitchen, where they often sit in various dishes while Ms. Mathoulin ponders them. If a stone is “a bit big or a bit dull,” she usually tosses it; keepers go into the drawers or are taken to her studio upstairs. That space is scattered with watercolors, finished pieces of jewelry and sundry elements that she said she moves around until they “start talking to each other.”
Ms. Mathoulin has designed a collection of settings, including Cage; Ribbon; Acorn, which resembles a cap; and Spectacle, which hugs the contours of the display element. So once she matches an element to a setting, she sketches the potential completed design and then watercolors it, just as she once did for shoes. (For commissioned pieces, such renderings are reviewed by clients.)
“Nathalie’s got an eye for a special stone and how to design around it,” said Rebecca Strudwick, a goldsmith in Loughborough, England, who executes Ms. Mathoulin’s designs.
“Precious stones in jewelry are normally made to be looked at in 180 degrees, but she’s using the whole 360 degrees.”
Ms. Mathoulin favors brushed or polished 18-karat gold but also has pieces produced in 9-karat and 14-karat gold. Whenever possible, she said, she and Ms. Strudwick use Fairmined gold, which is certified as traceable and environmentally friendly — but lately, given the metal’s surging cost, they have been using more Single Mine Origin Gold, which just meets a chain-of-custody standard and therefore is a bit less expensive. (In sterling silver, the designs always are produced in Fairmined silver.)
She pointed out the hallmark, a series of symbols indicating the purity, origin and maker, on one piece: “It’s like a sentence — it’s so long,” she said.
To show a guest, Ms. Mathoulin dangled a small example of one of her Four Stones necklaces, named for its four elements in four distinct settings. The price is determined by the size and the setting; so this particular one in 18-karat gold would cost $1,920.
Recently, she said, she and Ms. Strudwick have begun working on pieces that use combinations of gold and silver.
After all, there are “no real rules here,” Ms. Mathoulin emphasized. “I just want to keep challenging the idea of a ‘precious stone.’”
The post With Her Designs, Pebbles Become Distinctive Jewelry appeared first on New York Times.
