A FLAVOUR OF CURRY

When Melissa Curry launched her jewellery collection it was a hit, then single parenthood intervened. Now she’s back on track with new designs and an intriguing idea. Edited by Mary O’Sullivan. Photography by Tony Gavin

‘Costume jewellery is not made to give women an aura of wealth, but to make them beautiful” declared the wise, pithy Coco Chanel back in the early 20th Century, when women clamoured for her range of costume jewellery, usually featuring her signature intertwining Cs, or her trademark camellia.

Costume jewellery is back with a bang and one of Ireland’s leading designers of the genre is Melissa Curry; women certainly look more beautiful when decked out in her gorgeous, kaleidoscopic creations, made of gold, silver, textured glass, semi-precious stones and innovative new materials.

However, Melissa might take slight issue with Mlle Chanel — she doesn’t subscribe to the notion that costume jewellery is purely to make women look beautiful. As well as her moodenhancing pieces in exuberant shades of pink and blue and yellow, Melissa makes a range of what she calls amulets.

According to the dictionary, an amulet is a charm often inscribed with a word or incantation to protect or aid the wearer. Melissa’s amulets are etched with the word ‘success’. “You wear my amulet to remind yourself of what you want to achieve. I’m always aware that my work is about enhancing the outside, but part of me is always focused on the inside,” Melissa explains, adding that her work is inspired by her hurdles.

“Some women have heavier loads to carry than others and keeping one’s self-belief alive is one of our biggest challenges. We underestimate the importance of support and encouragement and, putting it all together, I’ve built this new gift for women, for girls, my most personal piece of work to date, which is called Success,” she explains as she points out the word itself inscribed on a rose-gold bar hanging between gold chains. “Your bar is your strength, your self-belief. It’s an amulet you wear to stay strong and to stay focussed,” she says.

As Melissa says, she has had her challenges, just as most grown-ups do. They were to come later in life. Her childhood was comfortable, middleclass, relatively conventional. Her father was an engineer by profession, whose work took him abroad to developing countries — Africa, China, Moldova. Over the years, the family was due to join him in different far-flung locations but it never happened, partly because her mother had her own business, a guesthouse, which kept her busy.

Nonetheless, Melissa was fascinated

‘The big word for me is compassion. You never know when it’s your turn, things can change so quickly’

by the exotic countries her dad worked in and, when she got the opportunity, she visited them for herself. Over the years she has spent time in Bangladesh, Central Africa and South Africa and her travels have had a huge impact on the development of her jewellery — the colours, the form, and the design itself.

However, the country which has had most influence on her work was France. “Because of my father, I had a massive curiosity about the world. The minute I finished school, I wanted to leave Ireland,” she says. “I went to Paris straight away but I came back to go to UCD. My parents hoped I’d study law, but my imagination wouldn’t settle to books. Our family is very linked to France, so I went back.”

At the beginning, Melissa worked as an au pair, but soon she got into a visual communication course at the Academie Charpentier and studied there for three years, from 1989 to 1992. “Paris is so bohemian; I was formed there,” she enthuses. “I worked in a beautiful jewellery shop in the Marais; I was working with all these amazing creatives. It was so carefree, such a stimulus, whereas here at home at the time, it was dull — anaemic.”

Melissa launched her jewellery career in the late 1990s and it took off immediately; the season following the launch, she became the Millenium designer for Liberty. She was soon working with the top stores in Paris and New York. “It was very exciting,” Melissa recalls. “All of a sudden, I was in demand. Instead of one or two products, I had to come up with hundreds. I was driven, I had a lot of energy, I could burn the candle at both ends, but it became too big for my infrastructure at the time.”

Then in 2002, she gave birth to her son, which had a seismic effect on her way of life. “My life changed fundamentally with the birth of Kito. This little boy’s life became my priority and we returned to Ireland in 2004. It was a very tough time, a very challenging time; it was a big learning curve,” she says explaining that Kito’s dad — a Frenchman — died when Kito was a baby, leaving her a single parent.

She continued to sell her jewellery from Ireland but she struggled juggling the business and her baby. “I drew on reserves of energy I didn’t know I had,” Melissa explains with a smile.

However, she feels she’s come through the trying times and, over the last two years, she’s experienced a form of renewal. “I’m more focused on me — as a mum, as a woman, as a creative,” she says. Her home is very much part of this regeneration. A period terraced house in Dublin 4, it has two reception rooms, a conservatory and a kitchen, as well as three bedrooms. It’s a perfect base for her design studio, while it’s big enough for herself and Kito to enjoy as a home. “It’s a beautiful community of different age groups — when we moved in ten months ago, one of the neighbours threw a party to welcome us,” she says.

While the walls of the different rooms are mainly white to reflect light, the furnishings are rich and textured, many of them reminders of the diverse countries she’s lived in over the years, as well as pieces collected by her father. “I have little antiques from China, stools from Ghana. I love my Tanzanian paintings — the first example of modern art in Africa. I came across them first in Paris, but the ones I have were brought back by my father,” she says.

More important though are the space, light and tranquillity necessary for her design work, and the house is full of all three. And she’s on a roll with her work, particularly the Success range. To Melissa’s delight, the Taoiseach presented Michelle Obama and her two daughters with Success pieces when they were here last year.

Because she hasn’t always found life easy, she wants to reach out to other women through her work, and she’s attended a lot of conferences, including the Festival of Ideas in Bristol last year. She’s also linked up with Arianna Huffington, the entrepreneur and author of Thrive, who wants women to start a revolution to change what is a male-based work template. “She was very taken by my Success project and very moved by it,” Melissa says.

“The big word for me is compassion. You never know when it’s your turn, you never know when you’re going to be vulnerable and things can change so quickly. I’ve had to go through it to understand it, I guess it’s the only way, but my gift to women is now through my endeavours with Success.”

Left The mature garden is full of subtle colour and clusters of bamboo

Above Jewellery designer Melissa Curry in her family room, which is furnished with vintage pieces and items she’s collected on her travels. The paintings on either side of the mantelpiece are from Tanzania. Her dog, Belle, is a basset hound

Top right Melissa uses one of the lovely period reception rooms as a design studio. It’s full of light as it opens on to the conservatory and garden beyond

Middle right Melissa got the Eames chairs in the dining area from eBay. The large photograph from the nag Gallery is by Roseanne Lynch, and the little white ducks are made from papier-mache. “I bought them in a co-op for widowed women in Bangladesh,” Melissa notes

Bottom right The picture above Melissa’s fabulous jewellery designs is by Gareth Jenkins and is also from the nag Gallery, see naggallery.ie