Goldschmied Krähenmann

Like the rest of this category, Goldschmied Krähenmann sits away from the city centre rather than close to it. The bench is at Am Bach 7 in Küsnacht, a lakeside village on the Goldküste, Zürich's Gold Coast, on the eastern shore rather than downtown. For a couple who already lives in Küsnacht, Zollikon or further round toward Meilen, or who is house-hunting in that direction rather than in the city itself, this is the one goldsmith on this list who sits closer to them than to the Hauptbahnhof.

The name on the door is Christoph Krähenmann, and the site's own tagline dates the business to 1976. That is the year he started a 4-year apprenticeship as a goldsmith under Küsnacht's Peter Bürlimann, earning his Swiss federal goldsmith diploma in 1980. He then left for California, hired straight out of his apprenticeship by the Costa Mesa branch of Bosshard & Co, where he stayed 7.5 years, followed by four more as workshop head and designer for the jeweller Silverhorn in Santa Barbara. In 1993 he opened his own atelier in Santa Barbara. Between 2003 and 2007 he also showed work at Baselworld alongside a mostly European group of jewellery and gemstone designers, and used every Swiss trip to look in on his old teacher in Küsnacht. Those visits are what led, in 2009, to Bürlimann asking whether Krähenmann would take the business over. After more than a year weighing it, he said yes, moved back in autumn 2010, and redesigned the small atelier's interior himself before doing anything else with it.

He built a reputation well beyond Santa Barbara along the way. He never ran a retail shop in the US, working instead through gem and jewellery trade fairs in Tucson, Las Vegas and New York, each appearance built around a new series of 25 to 50 pieces in a single design language. A friendship with Michael Scott, Apple Computer's first president, put some of Scott's own rare and outsized gemstones in Krähenmann's hands, and the resulting pieces were shown at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana in 2002, then at the Shanghai Museum and Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum in 2005. One of them, a 10-centimetre parrot brooch built from 450 hours of handwork, a blue tourmaline, 119 Paraiba tourmalines and 39 diamonds set in 950 platinum with a beak in 750 white gold, was chosen as the cover image for the gemological journal Gems & Gemology in 2006. His own site credits him with 7 further design prizes on top of that record.

Commissioning a ring

Krähenmann designs and makes engagement and wedding rings to order, sketching by hand before touching any metal, whether the brief is a new design or the rework of an heirloom stone. He works in Oekogold, recycled gold certified through GYR Edelmetalle AG, framed on the site as protecting both clients and natural resources rather than as a marketing line. Every finished piece is meant to be a one-off: he says on his own site that he would never simply copy a design, and that even a repeat of one of his own past pieces is varied enough to read as its own object. For the specialised steps he can't manage alone, he works with a small, long-standing group of outside partners rather than farming work out to whoever is cheapest that month.

There's no price list, appointment calendar or shopping cart on the site, in either language. To see him, you call or email during opening hours, Tuesday to Friday from 10:00 to 12:00 and 14:00 to 18:30, and Saturday from 10:00 to 16:00, and arrange a personal appointment; the contact page is signed by Christoph Krähenmann himself, an invitation rather than a form. That personal-appointment model, common across this category, cuts both ways for a newcomer to Zürich. It means an actual conversation about a stone or a size rather than a web checkout, but it also means the site publishes no prices, no quoted lead time for a commission, and nothing on shipping or duty for a piece bought here and later taken out of the country. Anyone ordering from abroad, or planning to leave Switzerland with the finished ring, should raise all of that directly when booking rather than assume an answer either way.

The site itself is fully bilingual: an English version of every page, Home, Jewellery, Gallery, Press, Showcases, About me and Contact, sits behind a language switcher in the header, so asking for that first conversation in English is clearly on offer before you even call. It also carries client testimonials from as far off as Los Angeles, New York and Calgary, which for an international buyer weighing a village atelier over a Bahnhofstrasse name is a real, if informal, signal that his English-speaking clientele is not a new idea for him.

A shopfront that doubles as a gallery

The shop at Am Bach 7 is also a small, rotating gallery. Krähenmann gives the space to other artists alongside his own display cases: it currently shows paintings from Esther V. Rausch-Frey's Plantes Magiques series, and has previously hosted the photographer Reto Caduff and the sculptor Peter Aerne. The shop windows themselves have turned into a running local story rather than a detail he plays down. During Küsnacht's long village-square construction works, he built a "construction site" display into the boarded view in 2014 rather than covering it up, a decision picked up by local and Swiss trade press at the time and, further afield, by the American magazine The Centurion under the headline "How One Jeweler Turned A Construction Nightmare Into A Dream Display." It fits a wider pattern: a good share of his catalogue, brooches and pendants shaped as butterflies, dragonflies and a fig leaf among them, comes directly from the nature photography he has kept up around Küsnacht for years, including one piece named for "the lightness of being" worked in 750 yellow gold with mauve sapphires and yellow diamonds. It's a small, telling detail about a goldsmith who treats his own shop window the way he treats a commission: as something to design rather than default on.

Who it suits

This isn't the workshop to pick if you want a browsable collection of named ring models, or a published price list to weigh against other quotes before you've even made contact. Krähenmann's site, in either language, asks you to call or write first. It is the right stop if you live along the Goldküste rather than in central Zürich, if you would rather commission from a goldsmith with an internationally exhibited body of work than a purely local one, and if you like the idea of a workshop that doubles, quite literally, as a small art gallery. Anyone bringing stones in from abroad, or planning to leave Switzerland with the finished ring, should ask about lead time and duty on the phone rather than expect it on the website, since neither is published there. That's a genuine gap for an international buyer, but a minor one against a design record that includes 7 prizes and museum exhibits in the United States, China and Canada.