Next up in our Out of Office series is Anabela Chan, the London-based designer whose eponymous house became the first in the world to champion laboratory-grown gemstones, proof that red-carpet glamour and a conscience need not be at odds.
Anabela’s path to the jeweller’s bench was anything but linear. Born in Hong Kong, where she lived until she was ten, she moved with her family to Paris before she and her sister were sent to boarding school on the English coast in Brighton. A child who loved the sciences and the arts in equal measure, she studied architecture first, working for Richard Rogers in London on the World Trade Center Tower 3 project in New York. A chance encounter then swept her into fashion, designing prints and embroideries for Alexander McQueen’s runway collections, before she finally returned to the Royal College of Art for a master’s in goldsmithing, metalwork and jewellery, launching her own brand the day she graduated.
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Ask her why jewellery, after all that, and the answer comes without hesitation. “For me, jewellery is the most magical thing you can wear,” she tells us. “It’s so empowering, and it has the ability to bring such personal joy. It’s a little treasure you can hold in the palm of your hand, and yet it can reach into the past as well as out into the future, it can transcend generations.” The ultimate ambition, she says, is simply “to create something that lasts.”
What lasts, in Anabela’s case, is also about something being made differently. She recalls reading about a conservation project in Namibia, a country famous for its diamond and uranium deposits, where a single reserve has lost 90% of its wildlife in just 120 years. “I truly believe the cost of the future is based on the decisions we make today,” she says. “Making the right choice really matters.”
For all the science, her philosophy of value is deeply romantic. “The most humble of materials can become precious to someone, it’s very much a perception,” she says. “A pebble can become precious because your daughter picked it up for you on the beach. A daisy chain can be special because of that summer in the garden. It’s that sentimental value that really matters, and that can come from anything.”
She is, naturally, wearing her own work. Her earrings feature a heart cut from tomato and carnelian, set in recycled aluminium refined from soda cans and plated with 24-carat gold; her pebble flower ring holds a “regenerative” rose quartz rebuilt from lapidary offcuts around a laboratory-grown pink sapphire, flanked by emeralds. Dearest of all is a one-carat heart on her little finger, made the year her daughter was born. “I haven’t taken it off since,” she says.
Then there’s travel, the thread running through all of it. Her grandfather was an avid traveller who filmed the first documentary into Tibet with little more than a camcorder and a backpack, and with homes in three cities, Anabela has rarely stayed still. In the past year alone she has taken her two young children – a six-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter – on nine trips, forever folding work into pleasure so they can see the world.
Downtime, she’s learned the hard way, is non-negotiable, and she spends it in nature. Hiking is her great love – a habit from Hong Kong, which most people picture as concrete jungle, and this summer’s six-hour trek through the Dolomites was a highlight. Her sustainability runs off-duty too: she carries a reusable bottle, reuses hotel towels and linens, buys only what she hopes to keep for a lifetime and, as a self-confessed “big sneaker girl” who never learned to drive, walks everywhere – her daughter to school, herself to meetings, all across London.
Her handbag is a study in the woman herself – a “bag within a bag” emblazoned champagne and French fries, slim card holders made from a friend’s surplus leather offcuts, a fountain pen and a brushstroke pen for notes of varying ideas, and a years-old notebook of quotes she collects as she finds them. (Every good thing in this world started with a dream, reads one.) And more essentials you’ll come to learn.
Watch for a portrait of a designer determined to prove that the future of luxury can be beautiful, magical and kind – and see whether you could reinvent an entire industry from a church food bank. Anabela Chan did.
Watch the full episode now.
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