Simone Gugger Goldschmiedin

Simone Gugger has run her own jewelry atelier under her own name since 2004, working alone from a small workshop on Hochstrasse 13 in Zürich's Fluntern district, a short tram ride north of the old town near the zoo. There is no shop staff, no second designer and no franchise behind the name: she designs, casts and sets every piece herself, and has done so since moving from selling through galleries to selling everything direct from her own bench.

The site's own navigation is a useful signal of how she organizes that work. Where most of the goldsmith sites in this category fold everything into one "Schmuck" or "Ringe" menu, Gugger's has Verlobungsringe (engagement rings) and Trauringe (wedding rings) as two separate, named sections, alongside Ohrschmuck (earrings) and Halsschmuck (necklaces). That split matters if you're shopping specifically for an engagement ring: you aren't scrolling past cocktail rings and pendants to find one, and it signals she treats an engagement commission and a wedding-band commission as different conversations rather than one catalogue of interchangeable rings.

What she actually makes

Her stated material of choice is recycled gold, mostly rose and red tones rather than yellow, paired with old-cut diamonds she calls Altschliff, plus sapphires, tourmalines, spinels, garnets and the occasional natural pearl. In an interview with the Zürich culture site the-edit.ch, she explains why she prefers the old cut over a modern brilliant: a contemporary brilliant is engineered so that all the light entering it reflects back out, and to hit that geometry, she says established houses grind away up to 70 percent of the rough stone's weight. An old cut instead starts from the shape of the rough stone and tries to preserve as much of it as possible, which is part of why it looks less uniform and, in her own description, almost as if it had been chipped rather than machined. That preference is also her reason for working in reclaimed material generally: it lets her use stones and gold that already exist, some of it cut and set more than 100 years ago, rather than sourcing anything new. For a fresh facet cut she works with local Swiss stone cutters, including at least one custom facet pattern she says is cut exclusively for her.

Every piece on the site carries a name rather than a model number: Mazel, Stella, Cailloux, en train, Shwedagon, Kiki, Heirloom, Facettes and others, each tied, by her own account, to the story of how it came about. That habit carries over into how she describes commissions. In the the-edit.ch interview she recounts one that began with a client who wanted, in her words, "a ring with a stone" and nothing more specific, no fixed deadline, no upfront design. Gugger pulled together a selection of old-cut diamonds for the client to choose from, then spent what she describes as a long stretch of time working out how to carry the stone's own historic cutting style over into the gold setting itself. The finished ring, now one of her named pieces, only came together once that particular idea clicked. It's a fair preview of what a bespoke conversation here looks like: unhurried, built around a stone or a piece of gold you bring or one she sources, with no fixed turnaround quoted anywhere on the site.

Getting an appointment

There is no shop window and no walk-in counter. The contact page states it plainly: "Nach telefonischer Vereinbarung steht die Ateliertür offen für Ihren Besuch," meaning the atelier door opens to visitors by phone appointment only, arranged directly with Gugger rather than through a booking system. For anyone still learning Zürich's transit map, the same page spells out the route: tram 10 from the Hauptbahnhof toward the airport, or tram 9 from Bellevue toward Milchbuck, both alighting at Haldenbach, or bus 33 to Spyriplatz. None of that will mean much on your first week in the city, but it's exactly the kind of detail that saves a first-time visitor a wrong turn out of the station.

One caveat worth flagging for an international or expat buyer specifically: the site is German-only, with no English toggle anywhere in its navigation or its sitemap. Nothing on the site states whether Gugger can run a consultation in English, so if that matters to you, it's worth confirming by phone before booking rather than assuming either way. The same goes for cost: none of the pages publish a price, a price range, or a fee structure for a custom commission, and neither resizing nor shipping and duty terms for someone leaving Switzerland are addressed anywhere on the site. That isn't unusual for a one-person bespoke atelier working project by project rather than off a price list, but it does mean the first phone call is doing more work here than it would with a shop that quotes figures up front, and you should treat anything about price or timeline as something to ask rather than something published.

Track record

Gugger trained first as a window decorator (Dekorationsgestalterin), including a stint on the display team at the Globus department store, and picked up informal bench time from a goldsmith on the side before being accepted into the "Schmuck und Gerät" (jewelry and objects) class at Zürich's art and design school, a five-year program she paid for herself. That combination, a design background plus a craft class built in the Bauhaus tradition of uniting art and workmanship, is a different route into the trade than the straight goldsmithing apprenticeship most of the other ateliers in this category describe.

The record since backs up the two decades in business. Her work appeared on the poster for a contemporary art exhibition at the Swiss National Museum in 2002, she has held solo exhibitions in galleries in Bern, and she has twice won the "best stand" prize at the Blickfang design fair in Zürich, an event that draws around 220 designers each year. One of those wins, the 2015 MINI Designpreis in the fashion and jewelry design category, came the first year she exhibited alone after ending a long-running joint stand with another designer at the same fair. In 2024, twenty years after going independent, she marked the milestone with what she calls a Jubiläums-Ausstellung, an anniversary show built around pulling older pieces out of her own archive to see how they held up. Press coverage on her presse page runs from a 2002 feature through pieces in NZZ, Blick and Annabelle, up to a 2023 mention, a longer and more independently documented paper trail than most of the other solo goldsmiths on this list can point to.

Who it suits

This atelier is a good match for a newcomer to Zürich who already has an heirloom stone, an inherited ring, or an old piece of gold they want reworked into an engagement or wedding ring, and who is comfortable with an appointment-only, phone-first process rather than a walk-in shop or an online configurator. It's a weaker fit for anyone who wants a published price before they call, wants the option of an English-language site to browse first, or needs a guaranteed turnaround for a fixed date, since none of those are stated anywhere on the site as it stands.

Verdict

Two decades of solo practice, a named body of work with real press and design-award history behind it, and a genuinely separate engagement-ring section rather than one generic ring catalogue add up to a specialist worth the phone call, not a generalist jeweler with a bespoke option bolted on. The German-only site and the absence of any published price or lead time are real gaps for an international buyer to plan around, but they're gaps you can close with one conversation, and by her own account in interviews, that conversation is where the actual design work starts anyway.