Chaumet CEO Charles Leung on high jewellery, craftsmanship and the maison’s blooming future in Singapore

The arrival of A Journey through Nature alongside the boutique’s new chapter feels anything but coincidental. The collection is among the most conceptually daring Chaumet has attempted in years—46 pieces structured as a triptych, and reaching, throughout, for something a figurative flower can never quite capture: the sensation a raw material provokes, the memory it unlocks. I encountered the collection first in France, where the Tea Field parure stopped me—its Colombian emerald of 23.81 carats so saturatedly green, so fluid in its sculptural white gold setting, that it conjures terraced fields through morning fog rather than any single leaf. More than 1,400 hours of craftsmanship went into that necklace alone. The Vanilla Flower centrepiece necklace—asymmetrical, architectural, built around a 10.71-carat D FL Type II-A diamond and requiring over 1,350 hours of making—holds tenderness and strength in the same breath. And the Coffee Aroma necklace, with its 12.09-carat Madagascar sapphire coiled in airy whorls of pavé-set white gold, suggests depth and warmth simultaneously. Then there is Star Anise—four pieces tracing the stellate form of a spice that has been sacred across Asia for centuries, its marquise-cut diamonds and candy-pink Madagascar sapphires a study in precise, earned femininity. These are not jewels that describe nature. They inhabit it.

“We didn’t have to always go back to the figurative representation of nature,” Leung explains. “We can think about sensory representation—of culture, of nature.” The conversations behind the collection began nearly two years ago, when he had just returned to the Maison. His ambition: to connect the craft of high jewellery to the broader world of intangible cultural heritage—to link the artisans of 12 Vendôme to the ancient traditions of tea cultivation, coffee roasting, spice harvest.

That the boutique is now equipped for bespoke high jewellery commissions is worth pausing on. “We have customers here who really want tailor-made jewellery,” Leung says simply. One such commission—a custom tiara completed just before the May reopening—was made for a long-standing Indonesian client based in Singapore, to mark a milestone anniversary, with plans to one day pass it on to her daughter at her wedding. It is, in miniature, everything Chaumet does best: exceptional craft, layered meaning, a future already sewn into the piece at the moment of its creation.

Leung speaks about Joséphine the way you speak about someone you’ve come to admire properly, not just historically. “In modern terms, she could be a big naturalist, a conservationist,” he says. “She brought to France so many different exotic plants and animals, just to make sure everything is diverse.” The tiaras and timepieces within A Journey through Nature—including a Vanilla Flower tiara in white and yellow gold and a creative complication timepiece of the same name—feel less like product launches than continuing chapters in a very long, very particular story.

When I ask Leung what success looks like, he doesn’t reach for numbers. “More interesting narratives,” he says, “staying true to our origin.” A beat. “If our founder is still here today, I think he would not find me a stranger.”

Leung speaks about Joséphine the way you speak about someone you’ve come to admire properly, not just historically. “In modern terms, she could be a big naturalist, a conservationist,” he says. “She brought to France so many different exotic plants and animals, just to make sure everything is diverse.” The tiaras and timepieces within A Journey through Nature—including a Vanilla Flower tiara in white and yellow gold and a creative complication timepiece of the same name—feel less like product launches than continuing chapters in a very long, very particular story.

When I ask Leung what success looks like, he doesn’t reach for numbers. “More interesting narratives,” he says, “staying true to our origin.” A beat. “If our founder is still here today, I think he would not find me a stranger.”

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