Two names, one bench
Bruce & Walsh began, as most jewellery houses do, with an apprenticeship.
Our diamond designer grew up around diamonds. His family had spent three generations in the cutting trade in Surat — the city where most of the world’s diamonds are polished, and where, decades later, the first commercial CVD diamond growers in India would set up their reactors. He learned to read a stone before he learned to drive: how a poorly made facet steals light, why a brilliant with a thick girdle looks dead in daylight, how much of a diamond’s beauty is decided by a cutter and not by the earth.
What he did not learn at home was how to make jewellery. That came later, and from two very different men.
Bruce was a bench jeweller of the old school, trained in a trade workshop where everything was made by hand and nothing left the bench until it was right. He taught our designer that a setting is a structure before it is an ornament — that a claw must hold a stone for fifty years, not fifty days, and that the inside of a ring, the part nobody photographs, is where you can tell whether a piece was made properly.
Walsh was a gemmologist. He had little patience for romance and none at all for vague selling. He taught our designer to state the specification: colour, clarity, carat, metal, weight. If you cannot write it down, he said, you should not be charging for it.
When our designer opened his own house in Kuala Lumpur, he did not use his own name. He used theirs. Bruce for the hand, Walsh for the eye.
Why lab-grown, and why now
By the time the workshop opened, our designer had watched the family trade change from the inside. CVD growing had moved from laboratory curiosity to serious production in the same city his family had polished stones in for sixty years — same cutters, same wheels, same standards, a different origin. A real diamond with a known provenance, and several times more of it for the same budget.
For a designer, that is not a compromise. It is a release. It meant centre stones at weights that would otherwise have been quietly impossible, halos that could be built properly instead of sparingly, and fancy colours chosen for a design rather than inherited from an auction.
So every piece is set in solid gold, in yellow, white or rose. Every design carries its catalogue code and a full specification of stones, carat weights and metal — Walsh’s rule, kept. Every setting is finished by hand — Bruce’s. And anything in the collection can be remade around someone else’s story, because that is how all of this started: one person, one stone, one conversation at a bench.
“Fine jewellery should feel personal, look extraordinary and be made with a clear conscience.”
— Our diamond designer
What a diamond purchase includes
Every piece is sold with the facts written down. These are the ones that decide a diamond. Each is explained in full on Our Diamonds.
- Cut — the faceting, together with polish and symmetry. This is what makes the stone sparkle in daylight.
- Colour — D–E for our white diamonds, the colourless top of the scale. Fancy Vivid and Fancy Intense for green, yellow and pink.
- Clarity — how clean the stone is inside. We set eye-clean diamonds: nothing you can see without a loupe. White accents are VVS.
- Carat — the weight, not the width. Listed stone by stone, and as a total.
- Shape — round, oval, pear, heart, emerald, marquise, radiant or cushion.
- Fluorescence — whether the diamond glows under ultraviolet light, and whether that glow whitens it or turns it milky.
- Metal — solid gold in yellow, white or rose, with the purity and the gold weight on the piece.
See the pieces in person, or tell us the stone you have in mind. Book a showroom visit, or start a bespoke design.