There is a photograph of my grandmother that I have kept since I was a child. She is wearing a necklace of Firouzeh, turquoise stones the colour of a winter sky over the Alborz mountains. She is not looking at the camera. She is looking at something just beyond it, the way people do when they are thinking about the future. I used to wonder what she saw. Now I think I understand.
I grew up in Iran surrounded by jewellery that told stories. Not just decorative objects, but objects with memory baked into them. Firouzeh, which Persians have worn and traded for over five thousand years. Geometric patterns drawn from Islamic architecture. The language of the Silk Road, carved and cast and set into metal. Jewellery in our culture is not an accessory. It is biography.
Birmingham and the School of Jewellery
When I arrived in Birmingham in July 2017, I brought that understanding with me. I also brought very little else. A suitcase, a sketchbook, and a place at the School of Jewellery at Birmingham City University. Birmingham was not an accident. It has been the heart of British fine jewellery manufacturing for centuries, and the Jewellery Quarter is one of the few places in the world where you can still find master craftspeople working in the traditional way, hand to bench, generation to generation. I wanted to learn from the best, and that is where the best were.
The two years at the School of Jewellery changed how I see the world. Not just technically, though the technical education was rigorous and I am grateful for every hour of it. What changed was something deeper.
At the School of Jewellery, the curriculum covers not just bench skills but the full language of the craft: construction in precious metal, stone setting in its many forms (pavé, claw, bezel, flush, channel), surface treatments from hammering and reticulation to polishing and plating, and the translation of drawings into three-dimensional objects. I worked through CAD and the physical disciplines simultaneously, which gave me a dual fluency that I have drawn on ever since. Understanding a design in three dimensions - knowing how it will sit on a wrist or finger, how the light will move across a surface, how the weight will distribute - requires both kinds of knowing.
The tutors at the School of Jewellery were, many of them, practitioners first and teachers second. They brought the professional world directly into the classroom. The standards were high because the stakes of fine jewellery are high: these are objects that will outlast the people who make them.
I began to see that the traditions I had grown up with in Iran and the traditions I was learning in Birmingham were not separate things. They were different expressions of the same human impulse: to take precious material and make it mean something. The Silk Road had connected these two worlds for centuries. I was just walking the same path, in the other direction.
Seven Years in Fine Jewellery Manufacturing
After graduating, I was fortunate enough to join Britain's largest fine jewellery manufacturer, where I spent seven years on the new product development team. Those years taught me an enormous amount about scale, about consistency, about what it takes to bring a design from sketch to showcase.
Working in NPD at that scale is a different discipline from studio jewellery. Every design decision has to withstand the pressure of production: will this construction hold across five hundred pieces? Does this stone setting style translate accurately when it leaves the workshop? Where are the points of failure under stress, under repeated wear, over years of use? Answering those questions rigorously is what separates work that lasts from work that simply looks beautiful in a display case.
I also learned, in those seven years, what customers actually want when they reach for something fine. I saw the data and I spoke to the people. What emerged, consistently, was that the pieces that carried the deepest meaning were the ones with a genuine story - a material provenance, a design reference, a reason for being. The market for meaningless luxury is smaller and more fickle than the market for jewellery with genuine content.
This shaped everything about how I approached Silux London. I wanted to build a brand where every piece had a real answer to the question "why does this exist?" Not a marketing answer. A design answer.
The Awards and What They Mean
Over the course of my career, I have received recognition from a number of sources. I won awards from the Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council in 2018, 2020, and 2024. In 2019, the A' Design Award recognised one of my pieces with a Gold. In 2020 I was granted a UK Global Talent Visa for exceptional ability in the arts and design. In 2025, I became a British citizen.
I tell you all of this not to impress, but to give you context. Because Silux London did not come from nowhere. It came from a very long journey.
The Goldsmiths' Craft and Design Council awards matter to me because they come from inside the trade - from people who understand the technical difficulty of what they are judging. An award from your peers in a craft-based industry is a different thing from an award given by generalists. The judges are working goldsmiths, setters, engravers, and designers. They know what it takes. When they recognise something, it is because it meets a standard they hold themselves to.
The Global Talent Visa was significant for a different reason. It represented formal recognition by the British government that I had something exceptional to contribute to this country's creative sector. That recognition gave me the security to build here, to commit to Birmingham and to the Jewellery Quarter as the place where Silux London would take shape.
The Name: Silk Road Plus Luxury
The name itself is that journey compressed into a single word. Silk Road plus Luxury. Silux. The Silk Road was not just a trade route. It was the world's first great cultural exchange, the path along which ideas and materials and craftsmanship moved between East and West for centuries. Persian turquoise travelled it. Persian design vocabulary influenced everything from Mughal jewellery to Ottoman metalwork to the Art Nouveau movement in Europe.
When I think about what I want Silux London to be, I think about that exchange. Something that honours where I come from while being entirely at home where I am now. A jeweller who speaks both languages - the language of Persian ornamental tradition and the language of British fine craft - and can translate between them in ways that produce something neither culture could produce alone.
That fusion is not a novelty or a gimmick. It is the central thesis of the work. You can read more about this in my essay on the story behind the Silux London name.
How Persian Design Vocabulary Works
Persian decorative arts have a design grammar - a set of forms, proportions, and compositional principles that can be read like a language once you know how to look.
At its heart is geometry. The repeating patterns of Persian architecture - the arabesques, the star polygons, the interlacing grids - are not simply decorative. They encode principles of infinite extension and self-similarity that have more in common with modern mathematics than with any other decorative tradition. A single tile in an Isfahan mosque wall contains within its geometry the same structure as the entire wall. The part contains the whole. This is a design philosophy, not just an aesthetic preference.
Persian floral motifs work differently but according to the same logic. The boteh - which Western textile traditions borrowed and simplified into the paisley - is not a leaf or a teardrop. It is a contained world: a swirling form that suggests both water and flame, plant and mineral, movement and rest simultaneously. Persian decorative artists understood ambiguity as a quality, not a problem to be solved.
I work with this vocabulary in every collection I design. In the Silk Road design series, I explore how these geometric principles translate into the scale and material properties of fine jewellery. In the Bahar Collection, each piece draws on a specific element of Nowruz symbolism - but the forms themselves are built from the geometric and botanical vocabulary of Persian decorative arts. It is always both things at once: culturally specific in its references, universally legible in its forms.
What I Do at Mappin and Webb
I currently work as a Sales Consultant at Mappin and Webb in Birmingham, one of the oldest and most respected jewellers in Britain, with a Royal Warrant and a history stretching back to 1775. Every day I speak with people who are looking for something meaningful - an engagement ring, a significant gift, a piece to mark a moment that cannot be marked any other way.
This work gives me something that a purely studio-based practice might not: direct, sustained contact with how people actually relate to fine jewellery. What they hesitate over. What they reach for immediately. What questions they ask, and what those questions reveal about what they are really looking for.
What strikes me, consistently, is that the people who care most about jewellery are not looking for something flashy. They are looking for something true. They want to know where it came from, who made it, and why it was made the way it was. They want a story they can carry with them. The design conversation they remember is not about carat weight or clarity grades - though those things matter and I explain them carefully. It is about meaning. What will this piece represent? What will it say, silently, for the next fifty years?
That is exactly what Silux London is built to give. And working at Mappin and Webb keeps me honest about it. I see, daily, the difference between jewellery that is bought and jewellery that is chosen - and I bring that understanding to every piece I design and every conversation I have with a Silux London client.
The Collections
My Firouzeh collection takes its name from the Persian word for turquoise. The stones come from Neyshabur in Iran, the finest source of turquoise in the world for thousands of years, and every piece in the collection is designed to honour that lineage while being wearable in a modern British life. The specific blue-green of Neyshabur turquoise - denser and more saturated than turquoise from other sources - is something that cannot be replicated elsewhere. It is a geological signature of a particular place and time, just as a Persian carpet is the signature of the hands that made it.
The Golestan collection draws its inspiration from the Persian garden, a concept of paradise made real through geometry and water and light. The Persian word for garden, pardis, became the English word paradise. These are not themed novelties. They are genuine expressions of a design language that I grew up with and have spent years learning how to translate.
Alongside the collections, I make bespoke and made-to-order pieces: rings, pendants, earrings, and bracelets that are designed around a specific person, a specific moment, or a specific material. This is the work I love most.
Why Bespoke
The bespoke service is perhaps the thing I care about most. The Silk Road ran on individual relationships, on trust between people who might never meet again. Bespoke jewellery works the same way. It begins with a conversation. What do you want to say? Who are you making it for? What materials matter to you, and why? What does the person you love actually wear, and how does their sense of self show up in the objects they choose?
From that conversation, I design something that could not exist for anyone else. The proportions are calibrated to the wearer. The materials are chosen for meaning as well as beauty. The construction is designed to last not just a lifetime but to be passed down. And the documentation - the design drawings, the material certificates, the provenance of the stones - travels with the piece.
That specificity is, I think, the most valuable thing a jeweller can offer in a world full of mass production. A bespoke piece from Silux London is not a product. It is the material record of a decision made by two people in a specific moment, translated by a designer into an object that will outlast them both.
What Silux London Stands For Today
After years of building, learning, and refining, I can now say clearly what Silux London is and what it is not. It is a British fine jewellery brand rooted in Persian heritage, making bespoke and made-to-order pieces in 18ct gold with ethically sourced gemstones. Every piece is designed by me, made in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter, and hallmarked by the Birmingham Assay Office. That is the foundation, and it does not change.
But a brand is more than its products. It is a set of values that show up in every decision. Here is what guides mine:
- Heritage with substance - Every Persian reference in my work comes from genuine knowledge and personal experience, not from a mood board or a trend report. I grew up with these traditions. I studied the design language formally and informally. When I reference the Chahar Bagh garden or the geometry of Isfahan, I am drawing on something I have lived with my entire life. That depth is not something that can be copied.
- Craftsmanship you can verify - Every piece carries a Birmingham Assay Office hallmark. Every diamond above 0.30ct comes with an independent grading report. Every design is documented through CAD renderings and process photographs. I believe transparency builds trust, and trust is the only thing worth building a brand on.
- Bespoke as a philosophy - Even the collection pieces are made to order. I do not hold stock because I do not believe in making jewellery that has no destination. Every piece is made for someone, and that someone shapes the final result. A ring ordered in size J is not the same as the same ring in size P. The proportions shift. The weight changes. I adjust each piece to suit its wearer, and that care is invisible but essential.
- Honest pricing - My pricing reflects the actual cost of materials at current market rates, skilled labour, hallmarking, and a fair margin. I do not inflate prices to create an illusion of exclusivity. If you ask me what a piece costs to make, I will tell you. That openness is rare in this industry, and I think it should be normal.
- Longevity over trend - I design pieces that will look as relevant in twenty years as they do today. That means classic proportions, timeless materials, and a design language drawn from traditions that have endured for millennia rather than seasons. Fashion jewellery has its place, but Silux London is not in that business.
These values are not aspirational. They describe what I do now, every day, with every piece. If they resonate with you, I would love to hear from you.
The Future of Silux London
Looking ahead into 2025 and 2026, Silux London is at an exciting point. The Bahar Collection launched on Nowruz 2026 and represents the fullest expression so far of what the brand can be: deeply personal, culturally rich, technically excellent, and genuinely wearable.
New collections are in development. I am working on pieces that explore different chapters of Persian decorative history, from the courtly jewellery of the Qajar era to the abstract geometric patterns of pre-Islamic Iran. Each collection will follow the same principle that guides the Bahar pieces: real cultural content, translated into contemporary fine jewellery through the craft traditions of Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.
I am also expanding the bespoke service. The demand for personally meaningful, one-of-a-kind pieces has grown steadily, and I want to make the process even more accessible. That means clearer pricing guidance, more detailed online consultations, and a wider range of starting points for clients who know they want something unique but are not sure where to begin. The bespoke enquiry page is always open.
On the studio side, my long-term ambition is a dedicated Silux London workshop in the Jewellery Quarter, a space where clients can visit, see the making process, and be part of the creation of their piece from start to finish. Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter has been the centre of British goldsmithing for over two centuries, and I want Silux London to be a visible part of that continuing story.
The broader vision has not changed since day one. I want to build a jewellery brand that proves Persian heritage and British craft are not just compatible but are stronger together. That the Silk Road, in its modern form, runs through a workshop in Birmingham. And that fine jewellery, made with genuine skill and genuine meaning, is worth every penny and every hour that goes into it.
The Journey That Brought Me Here
I started Silux London because I had a story to tell and a set of skills to tell it with. Because there is a gap in the British jewellery market for work that is genuinely influenced by Persian and Silk Road heritage, not as a pastiche or an exotic novelty, but as a living tradition brought into contemporary practice.
And because, if I am honest, I owe it to my grandmother and to every craftsperson along the way who kept these traditions alive long enough for me to learn from them. The turquoise miners of Neyshabur. The meenakari enamellers of Isfahan. The master goldsmith teachers at the School of Jewellery. The setters and polishers who let me watch over their shoulders at the bench. The clients at Mappin and Webb who taught me what people actually want when they reach for something fine.
The journey from Neyshabur to Birmingham is a long one. Silux London is my attempt to make it worthwhile.
If any of this resonates with you, I would genuinely love to hear from you. Whether you are curious about my collections, thinking about a bespoke piece, or simply interested in the heritage behind the work, the door is open. You can also explore what makes Persian geometry unique in jewellery design, or read about Nowruz and its significance in Persian culture - the traditions that shape the work.
