Webster’s high jewellery collection is known for its bright stones
Stephen Webster is the king of celebrity jewelers but his wedding rings for Madonna and bracelets for Christina Aguilera are not his proudest achievements.
Stephen Webster outside his flagship store in Mayfair, London
[dropcap size=small]I[/dropcap]t’s 6pm and Stephen Webster is sprawled on the sofa in my office drinking champagne. He looks a bit like Keith Richard, only 30 years younger.
“I feel like I never stop traveling,” he says, between sips of Bollinger. “Last week Russia, this week Hong Kong, next week Brazil.”
If Webster feels that all the airplane meals and jet lag are a burden he doesn’t show it, rather he has the air of a man who can’t believe the fates pay him handsomely for doing what he loves.
“It’s true, I still get such a kick out of designing pieces that clients drool over,” he says, his London accent chopping the endings of words like an East End butcher trimming steak. “It’s not just people like Cristina (Aguilera), although we’re great friends and she’s been very good to me. It’s any client who gets a charge out of something I create.”
The night before we had been dining at the Upper House in Hong Kong. Webster hosted a table populated by the world’s most famous collector of Gerhard Richter paintings, a gallerist from Shanghai, an importer of Chinese caviar and an acquisitions specialist from the luxury industry. It was a typical Webster mix, arty, but down to earth, wealthy, but cultured. As a very good Lebanese wine flowed (the peerless Chateau Musar) Webster explained his plans for Asia.
“We want to give the most discerning connoisseurs a taste of what our finest pieces are like,”
he says. “The way we combine coloured stones and precious metals is something unique.”
Webster’s distinctive designs – large, flashy pieces, often featuring vivid coloured stones set among diamonds and sapphires, and with a faintly gothic, punky twist – have won him fans from South Korea to Kazakhstan.
Despite his ritzy-glitzy lifestyle – he’s out and about five nights a week, partying, dining and schmoozing his starry clients – Webster’s manner is refreshingly down to earth. Although he counts Aguilera, Bryan Ferry and Clash guitarist Mick Jones among his friends, he has no celebrity airs. He likes champagne but he is just as comfortable drinking a beer and being called mate. Brought up in Gravesend, a provincial town in Kent, he talks of his time growing up there as one of the things that has helped to keep him grounded.
“We were a nice, close-knit, working-class family,” he says. “My dad was a draughtsman, and hated it; my mum kept house and was a charitable sort, always doing things for other people. As a father myself [he has a 18 year-old daughter from his first marriage, plus a ten and a eight-year-old with his Russian wife and business partner, Anastasia], I really appreciate the amount of time they devoted to us and the contrast with my own life, where my career tends to take everything.” That domestic security also gave him the confidence to quit school at 16 and enter a profession that was unfashionable to say the least.
A piece from the 2012 Stephen Webster high jewellery collection
“The only thing I was good at in school was art. So I went for an interview at an art school, thinking that I wanted to be a fashion designer. But I found it was full of women, and all a bit camp, and having come from an all-boys school, I felt uncomfortable with that.” By contrast he found the jeweller’s course to be more hands on, more masculine in the conventional sense. “I loved it from the beginning,” he says, “and I thought I could definitely make a living doing it, but it never occurred to me that it could be a career in the way it has been”.
A year later he was serving his apprenticeship in Hatton Garden, the centre of London’s jewellery trade. But he was bored.
So he jumped ship and finished his apprenticeship with one of them, then left to set up his own studio.
“You have to jump straight in,” he muses. “Every year I give a talk to students and I always tell them to get stuck in. You can calculate and calculate, and plan and plan, but we all start out with nothing, so you need to make your time your investment.”
The turning point came in 1981, when a Canadian “gem adventurer” asked him to run his workshops. “I’d never been abroad, but I created a life for myself in Alberta. The guy would go travelling; collecting gems and left me to it. Most of the things he came back with I’d never heard of – tanzanites and tourmalines. They were huge with incredible colours. That started my passion, the roots of where I am today.”
“We were a nice, close-knit, working-class family,” he says. “My dad was a draughtsman, and hated it; my mum kept house and was a charitable sort, always doing things for other people. As a father myself [he has a 18 year-old daughter from his first marriage, plus a ten and a eight-year-old with his Russian wife and business partner, Anastasia], I really appreciate the amount of time they devoted to us and the contrast with my own life, where my career tends to take everything.” That domestic security also gave him the confidence to quit school at 16 and enter a profession that was unfashionable to say the least.
“The only thing I was good at in school was art. So I went for an interview at an art school, thinking that I wanted to be a fashion designer. But I found it was full of women, and all a bit camp, and having come from an all-boys school, I felt uncomfortable with that.” By contrast he found the jeweller’s course to be more hands on, more masculine in the conventional sense. “I loved it from the beginning,” he says, “and I thought I could definitely make a living doing it, but it never occurred to me that it could be a career in the way it has been”.
A year later he was serving his apprenticeship in Hatton Garden, the centre of London’s jewellery trade. But he was bored.
So he jumped ship and finished his apprenticeship with one of them, then left to set up his own studio.
“You have to jump straight in,” he muses.
“Every year I give a talk to students and I always tell them to get stuck in. You can calculate and calculate, and plan and plan, but we all start out with nothing, so you need to make your time your investment.”
Stephen and Anastasia at the opening of their Moscow store
He spent the rest of the Eighties in Canada and the US, “making jewellery for women aged 50-plus”, saving enough money to start his own collection.
“There were four of us, including my brother [who still works with him]. We gradually built up the business, designing, and selling to the US. But it was under someone else’s banner.”
In the mid Nineties he met his wife-to-be, Anastasia, at a lunch. “I was there with my dad and my brother, and she was at the other end of the table, I’d never met a Russian before and she was great fun. We met up again in the States, where she was living and I was spending a lot of time, and we kept in touch, writing letters, and talking on the phone. Then she moved over here.”
Assia, as she is known, with her glamour and flair for PR, has been a huge influence. Two weeks after champagne with her husband I am with Assia at the Connaught in London for a glitzy book launch attended by the likes of Christian Louboutin. The Stephen Webster flagship headquarters is just across the street, rubbing shoulders with high-end iterations of stores by Marc Jacobs, Louboutin and Goyard.
“Stephen always says it was love at first sight,” she says later, as we dine in Hix, an extraordinarily successful Soho restaurant in which the couple are major investors. “It wasn’t for me, if I am being honest. He did sweep my off my feet, eventually, but it was a process.”
Assia is chic, full of energy and one of the most determined people one could meet. She is the perfect counterpoint to her husband’s more laconic approach and her drive has been a determining factor in the growth of the brand. And Mr Webster is well aware of her role in his dramatic success.
“She said, “You’re a great jeweller, but no one knows anything about you”. And it was she, together with some mates in the music business, who suggested I become the face of the brand. I became a personality in a business that didn’t have any. And the timing was right.”
It’s a role he’s comfortable with. “The celebrity connection has been brilliant. If Sienna Miller buys Rhys Ifans one of my pieces as a Christmas present, that’s cool. Because I am the face of the brand, I get associated with celebrities. That’s how people know we aren’t bluffing. It would be a bit odd to be a celebrity jeweller and not have a real connection with that world. About 90 per cent of the people we work with are famous, and some have become good friends.”
He says working with his wife, who handles the PR, makes it difficult to switch off. So each weekend they head to their home in Kent. “Weekends are about my family. Assia and I spend so much time traveling and apart from each other, that we have to give each other freedom, and we have to trust each other. We miss each other and our kids, but these are the things that make it work for us. It’s our family that makes me more proud than anything else.”
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