Temple St. Clair Carr

Temple St. Clair Carr is an alchemist; this much is clear even before you've learned that her book on the art of fine jewelry design, out last year from HarperCollins, is called Alchemy: A Passion for Jewels. It is not that Temple St. Clair turns baser metals into gold; it is that she turns gold into a much larger, older story, one which becomes immediately personal for the transformed wearer.

In taking the simple, classic, and clean – the American (think Ralph Lauren), and inserting the historic, the educated, and the valuable – the European, Temple St. Clair has perfected the art of turning the simply beautiful into the continually significant.

This merging of the New and Old Worlds is a theme that is intrinsic for the New York-based designer. In a video interview by Melanie Oswald, St. Clair speaks about her beginnings as a designer, and I was drawn in by her round Southern O's, balanced by her perfect elocution, the foreign sounding L's. This woman, I thought to myself, was raised in the American South and educated in Europe. An All-American girl totally at home in the big world. (And what a name that girl was given towards this end! Temple.)

Temple St. Clair

…Indeed, the biography accompanying Alchemy tells readers that St. Clair was "a Southern girl with a nomadic spirit and a voracious appetite for history and culture…[who] grew up spending summer vacations in Morocco and Bavaria, [and] studied at an international boarding school in Switzerland…In her early twenties, Temple St. Clair landed in Florence, where she completed a master's in Italian literature. In fact, she had no exposure to jewelry making until her visiting mother bought an ancient coin and asked St. Clair to commission a local goldsmith to make a piece of jewelry around it."

The rest is history, so to speak. That initial exposure to the craft and its artisans was where Temple St. Clair found her personal grail – in the multicultural, ancient, and yet up-to-the-minute world of jewelry design.

Her Da Vincian sense of perfect proportion, her global awareness of effortless elegance, and her American grasp of the appeal of what's new, make Temple St. Clair's line of fine jewelry distinctive in terms of traditional, pure beauty. Her eye for detail and her sensitivity to color are extraordinary. There is nothing extra, nothing clunky, not a hint of bling. In an instant, the lucky wearer is transfigured into a worldly woman of great taste. (Which she probably is, if she can afford St. Clair.)

 "Temple St. Clair has perfected the art..."

Using gold and gemstones, particularly the ethereal blue moonstone, which seems to be her signature, St. Clair simply puts pleasure in a piece. This is everything jewelry should be – luxurious, special, and the highest compliment possible for she who receives it. St. Clair's cocktail rings, in particular, are truly to die for in terms of color and craftsmanship. The designer also makes use of classical concepts such as angels, astrological signs, and amulets to infuse her thoroughly contemporary pieces with their aesthetic roots in ancient Rome.

Established in 1986, this young luxury house has been featured repeatedly in Vogue, Town and Country, Harper's Bazaar, and other major fashion magazines; by now, Temple St. Clair is an established designer jewelry brand, synonymous with the modern classic.