Jeweller Shaun Leane has gone back to the source

Late-morning sunshine noses its head over the barn door into the kitchen where Shaun Leane has just poured his third cup of tea. Not that he needs it. Here, in his tiny, 250-year-old cottage in the palms of the Killarney mountains, hemmed with wildflower hedgerows, golden gorse bushes and vast, swirling clouds, he sleeps like a dream. 

“Look at that,” he laughs, cradling an implausibly large goose egg. He has all the tenderness of a master craftsman who, at just 18, four years into his apprenticeship in Hatton Garden, was exhibiting such skill that he was entrusted with setting jewels for royalty. “My neighbour sends her son up with one of these for my breakfast. You don’t get that in Muswell Hill.”

As pin-neat in an Aran jumper as he is in the tailored suits of his Mayfair atelier, the 54-year-old Leane is currently celebrating 25 years of his eponymous house and 40 years on the goldsmith’s bench. Best known for his provocative, groundbreaking collaborations with the late Lee Alexander McQueen, his best friend for two decades, he has worked with Boucheron, De Beers and Asprey among others and won UK jewellery designer of the year four times. Sotheby’s vice chairman of jewellery in New York Frank Everett calls him “one of the most talented and important artists working today”. 

Born to an English mother and an Irish father, who left for London at 15, Leane has always had a foot in two worlds. He spent his childhood living between Finsbury Park and the family farmhouse in south-west Ireland, with his “Nana”, grandad and a joyfully chaotic “rough and tumble” of aunts, uncles and cousins. 

“I had a beautiful upbringing here because it was wild, and very free,” he says. “I was an only child but I have, like, 45 first cousins, so when Mom and Dad were in London building the construction business, I was playing in the mountains. It was tough but very grounding, very happy. There was a simplicity that was in complete opposition to my life in London, where I was a latchkey kid.”

It was this “extreme juxtaposition of existence” that set his trajectory. London gave him his training, the ability to “set down an aluminium skeleton corset and knock up a tiara”, but Ireland gave him an equally important “blueprint”, underpinning his fiercely romantic, nature-led designs. Here, the realities of life – particularly death – were accepted, celebrated. “Nothing was swept under the carpet.” 

As his career took him in all directions, Leane returned to Ireland less and less. But a period of reflection allowed him to reappraise his life. “I’d finally put some acceptance around Lee [the designer took his own life in 2010],” he says. “I’d been living purely through creation, for both of us, for years after he died, working in a dangerously hectic way, and I started thinking, ‘Right, I want to live and see some of the world,’” he says. “It’s time to grow.” 

I am here to create, and through that I can change my life and others’

Taking on an investor meant he could put a senior-management structure around what was still a family-style, artisanal outfit. The brand now has 25 employees and over 50 points of sale across the world, with the UK and the US its biggest markets; bespoke accounts for a third of the business. With a CEO for the first time, and a commercial director, Leane had a flexibility he “had never known”. He started sofa-surfing with his Irish cousins and hiking in MacGillycuddy’s Reeks – now his breakfast view – to get fit. When his father fell ill, climbing here helped Leane to restore his own mental and physical strength while caring for him – and finally, when he died last year, to come to terms with the loss. 

“Something happened up there,” he says, gesturing to Strickeen mountain. “It all started to unravel and come back together more clearly. An intense joy, connection… connectedness.” 

When an ancient cottage, just over the hill from his father’s childhood home, came up for sale, needing a new roof and a new well, he embraced it – and he’s kept it traditional, down to the daffodils on the kitchen table. It has been a homecoming, he says, not just to his wider family, but to himself. His “bench” here is a pew high in Tomies Wood, a spectacular mountain trail. “I hike every day and draw, uninfluenced, uninterrupted. The inspiration comes from somewhere so true.”

Leane’s new-found licence to move between spheres has injected momentum into every area of his own business. “People talk about a second wind; I’m getting a third,” he says. Signum, a new fine jewellery collection of signets, bracelets and scapulars with animal motifs, illustrates this harmonious moment. Informed by Celtic mythology and storytelling traditions, and his pagan ancestors’ reverence for nature, it features “kindred spirit” creatures, each held within a protective shield. Leane put on the first prototype (the bull signet ring, representing strength) during his father’s illness and wears it to this day.

Another new fine-jewellery collection, Sabre Solis, in silver and ceramic, further develops his archetypal curvilinear silhouette. And next year, we’ll see a high-jewellery suite inspired by Ireland’s changing seasons and Black Orchid, a follow-up to the popular Blackthorn woodland and wildflowers – a series of flora‑inspired pieces in blackened metals and pearls. Long-term plans are also afoot for new categories, from interiors to perfume – “I’ve already chosen the scent” – and he’s “birthed” a high-jewellery collection, a long-term project that he believes to be the most important he’s ever designed. But he is in no rush. The time and space for contemplation is worth its weight. 

It has also been helpful when working on another more personal commission. Leane has worked with a farmer from Norfolk, Hugh Mason, on memorials for both his young sons who died only years apart. Having designed a series of memorial objets to commemorate Mason’s elder son Arthur, Leane has also created a headstone at St Botolph’s churchyard in Shingham, Norfolk, in honour of Harold, the younger son, and is developing a public artwork around the graveyard. A large bronze gate, with “vines” incorporating animals, birds and bugs, will provide something for visiting children to discover. Leane sees these commissions as an important part of his journey as an artisan.

“I feel that I am here to create and through that I can change my life and others’,” he says. “My ambition is to stay true to being an artisan, in all forms – as long as I’m true to that core, I’ll end up in the right place.”

Everett agrees. “Shaun has worked diligently for many years to achieve what he has achieved,” he says. “He understands the lineage and that’s why he’s able to make such cutting-edge design. It’s from his self-education and his own curiosity about the past, but first and foremost from being trained as a bench jeweller and goldsmith and making traditional things.”

He adds: “He has been ahead of so many things. We’re only talking about unisex jewellery now, but his pieces really are for everyone. They’re art. And the emotion, the meaningful and spiritual messages – it’s genuine.” 

For Leane, the act of remembrance runs deep; he believes that jewellery is “how we go on forever”. He wears a Victorian mourning ring that he found in the Lanes in Brighton, engraved for James Branbury, the first 18-year-old barrister in England, who championed children’s welfare. “I get a beautiful energy from it. He’s long gone, but someone picked up the marker of his life and carried it into the future.” 

He also wears his father’s jewellery, and memento mori pieces embedded with locks of hair. Jewellery “is all about human emotion”, he says. “Yes, we’re creating objects of beauty for people to admire for generations – but to touch someone’s heart… that’s the most important thing there is.” 

shaunleane.com