Cartier unveils its high jewellery workshop, the largest in the world

With nearly 200 highly skilled craftsmen united under one roof in Paris, Cartier has the world's largest fine jewellery workshop. Since September 2016, the flagship house of the Richemont luxury group has brought together its various production sites in a single location, a discreet building in Paris' 9th arrondissement, located in the heart of the capital's historic jewellery district, which FashionNetwork.com was able to visit. Report.

To enter this building, you have to show your credentials. On the upper floors, you need a badge to go from one room to another, while access to each floor is granted to each visitor individually. The long windy corridors are fitted with red carpets. With glass walls, the workshops look like individual offices. These are deliberately small rooms, to perpetuate the spirit of the Parisian micro-workshops, each with a maximum of a dozen craftspeople, but often fewer, including two apprentices, as the trade is mainly passed on through training.

The site, which employs more than 500 people, also houses the workshops dedicated to fine jewellery, which produce small series (around ten pieces per model), and those dedicated to new jewellery, which require far fewer hours of work on each piece, as well as gemologists, logistics and engineering. The fine jewellery workshops occupy three floors, plus the workshop above the historic Cartier boutique on Rue de la Paix, with 25 jewellers.

The craftsmen receive a drawing from the creative team. From this single image, with the stones in hand, they design and develop the entire piece, imagining in advance the construction stages and sequences to organise and programme the creation of the jewel, usually over a long period of time. All of these unique pieces require between 1,000 and 2,000 hours of work, equivalent to two years' labour, and can even take up to 5,000 hours. The fine jewellery craftsman produces barely fifty pieces of jewellery in his forty-year career. To complete a collection of 200 to 300 pieces, it takes at least two years and meticulous organisation down to the smallest detail, with each creation involving seventeen different trades.