World of A.R.D
Two generations. One bench. Forty years of brilliance.
The story behind A.R.D, told the way we'd tell it across a kitchen table.
"We didn't change what we make. We changed how we make it. So the only thing limiting a piece is the imagination behind it."
Anuj & Dimple Shah, Founders
Chapter One · Legacy
A family in diamonds.
The Shah family started working with diamonds forty years ago. First as cutters, polishing rough stones in Surat in the back room of a small workshop. Then as wholesalers, sending parcels of finely cut natural diamonds across India. Then, slowly, as jewellers. Designing the rings, the necklaces, the long imagined pieces that family clients had been describing in their heads for years.
By the time Anuj joined the family business, two decades ago, the small workshop had become an atelier. He apprenticed at the bench, then took over stone selection. Twenty years later, he can name the origin of a sapphire by holding it under daylight for three seconds.
Dimple came later. First as the eye behind the design book, then as the voice every client knows. Today she runs every fitting, every consultation, every customer relationship the maison has. The face of A.R.D, in every sense.
Chapter Two · Vision
The pivot to lab grown.
For most of those forty years, every stone in the workshop was a natural diamond. About four years ago, that began to change.
The decision wasn't political. It was practical, and a little romantic. With lab grown diamonds, the size of a stone stops being a financial constraint. The design starts being limited only by what we can draw. A 5 carat centre stone becomes attainable. A 16 carat tennis necklace becomes attainable. A piece a client has wanted to wear for twenty years stops being something she can't justify.
Lab grown diamonds are chemically, optically and physically identical to mined diamonds. The atomic structure is the same. The light return is the same. The hardness is the same. What changes is the cost basis. What changes with it is what's possible.
For our coloured stones, sapphires, emeralds, rubies, we still source natural goods, hand picked for colour and provenance. Some traditions are worth keeping.
Chapter Three · The Atelier
How we make things.
Every piece begins as a sketch on tracing paper. Anuj draws by hand. Dimple edits by phone. The client gets to weigh in on every iteration. The height of the gallery, the width of the band, the position of the bail.
Once the design is locked, the piece is wax modelled, cast in white gold (or yellow gold, or platinum, on request), and hand finished by setters who have, in some cases, spent thirty years at the bench. Stone setting takes longer than the casting and the polishing combined. We refuse to rush it.
Most pieces leave the atelier four to six weeks after the commission is confirmed. Bespoke commissions, the brooches in particular, can take longer. For those, we'll give you a date and we'll keep it.
Every piece is engraved on the inside with our maker's mark and the year. So that decades from now, when a daughter is admiring it, there's no question whose hands made it.
Come and see for yourself.
We'd love to talk you through any piece, or hear what you have in mind. Private viewings are by appointment, online or in person.