Golden Girl

Westbourne Grove’s eminent jeweller Dinny Hall on why she still loves Notting Hill

Above: Westbourne Grove's Dinny Hall

Last time Dinny Hall was interviewed by The Hill, she was propping up the bar at the Groucho. Not these days, though. With four shops, an 11 year son and a new range of 14 carat gold jewellery to look after, her party girl days are mostly behind her. And although she’s still based at her Westbourne Grove shop, she now lives in Shoreditch. “But I’m still really a Notting Hill girl. You can take the girl out of west London but you can’t take the west out of the girl,” says Dinny.
Dinny Hall is one of London’s favourite jewellers. Namechecked in Bridget Jones, included in the Standard’s ‘30 things to do before you’re 30’ list (buy your girlfriend jewellery from Dinny Hall) and worn by everyone from Erin O’Connor to Anish Kapoor via Liz Hurley, Dinny’s jewellery has been popular ever since she launched in 1985. Though it hasn’t been easy: when she opened her Westbourne Grove shop in 1990, her annual rent was £15,000 and now it’s £100,000. “Nobody else who’s here now was here then. Tom’s had just opened and Themes and Variations was there, and J&M Davidson, but otherwise it was all antiques and lovely little junk shops,” she remembers.
Dinny set up her business straight out of St Martin’s from a workshop in Soho, and it took off immediately. “I led a very bohemian lifestyle doing a lot of fashion shoots. It was very hand to mouth but on the outside very successful really.” Her work was experimental and couture-y, and not necessarily all that wearable. “I’d spend hours threading beads and used lots of Perspex and techniques such as photoetching. I’d stick leather on to things and try all kinds of different materials. Christy Turlington’s first ever Elle cover shows her wearing a pair of earrings that I’d made out of ebony lace-making bobbins and covered in silver. In those days I had the enthusiasm to do it for no money.” With her many fashion industryconnections , Dinny was getting work with lots of designers and magazines, and her collections ended up in Bergdorf Goodman, Liberty and Browns without, it seems, much knocking on doors on her part. “I was a real party girl and I was sort of out there and knew everybody.”
But despite the high profile, Dinny almost went bust when the first Gulf war dried up her American income. She thought that a local shop might help her make ends meet and allow her to carry on wholesaling. Which it did – while completely changing the way she designed. “I came to understand that you’re not just doing it for yourself. Suddenly I had a market right there on my doorstep and I could see what people wanted and how much they wanted to spend. So things began to get smaller and more wearable while materials became more precious.” Which brought her back to her early ambitions, really. “At college in the late 70s I thought there was a real gap in the market. All jewellery was either costume jewellery or fine jewellery and there wasn’t really any silver. My real aim was to make jewellery for the people and I didn’t want to be toying around with huge diamonds.” She stopped using Perspex and stopped making absolutely everything herself because it just wasn’t sustainable any more. Now she and her team make all the originals in Westbourne Grove, and all the gold, but the silver is copied in Asia. These days Dinny has four shops, one in Islington and two concessions, one in Selfridges and the other in Liberty, because you can’t just have one shop, she says. “It’s just not viable in London any more. They’ve already booted people out of Elgin Crescent and everyone left has got two or three shops at least.” So is she an empire? “No! You always compare yourself with people who have 60 shops. I’m not an empire compared with my friend Anya Hindmarsh.”
Dinny’s designs are all inspired by nature and architecture. The shapes of leaves, reflections, angles and details are sketched into shapes that are moulded in wax to become rings, necklaces, bracelets and earrings. Some designs are 10 years old and reworked over the years, while three new collections every year displace things that have run their course.
The new 14 carat gold range is designed as a midpoint between silver and 18 carat gold. “Over the past few years there have been a lot of ridiculous £25,000 necklaces used all over the press, but nobody buys them really. The pop stars borrow them and the things that do sell in Garrards are the diamond studs that they’ve always sold. There aren’t that many people who will spend £25,000 on what is essentially a fashion item – even very wealthy people won’t do that. We have some very wealthy people coming in here who might buy silver because all their jewellery’s in vaults and they don’t need to buy diamond-encrusted skulls or whatever. You just don’t see aristocratic people walking down the street wearing huge diamonds round their necks, it’s really only P Diddy isn’t it?” So the idea is to catch the market that’s spending £800 on a handbag and get them to spend it on a 14 carat gold necklace instead.
Business for Dinny and for several others on Westbourne Grove is down a staggering 20% in the wake of Fresh & Wild closing. “Not the top end, but all the silver sales are down. I went marching off to the landlord and said you’d better get us something good, not another dinosaur like Joseph. It’s like a morgue in there and those security guards are awful. He assured me that he’s going to get something good for the area but we’ll just have to wait and see.” Dinny used to go to Zucca, until that closed down, and she was always in 192 while that was still around, but six years ago she moved from Clanricarde Gardens to east London for a new start. “I was ghettoised around here. I never went to any other parts of town and when my marriage ended I wanted to view London as a bigger place than just W11.” Anyway, she says, the restaurants are much better in Shoreditch. “Not that I’m cynical about
Notting Hill. I think it’s been a cool place to live ever since
Performance and it hasn’t lost its essence, though it is a struggle.” Anyway, she’s not moving back.
Not to live. Though the shop’s certainly not going anywhere. Pendle Harte

www.dinnyhall.com