Where the pearls come from. A story that started in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Some things find you when you're not looking for them. The best things usually do.

In the early days of what would become my life I was sailing around the world on my own yacht. Somewhere in Panama, transiting the canal from the Atlantic into the Pacific, I met a man on another yacht doing exactly the same thing. We didn't know then what that meeting would become. We just knew we were both pointed in the same direction.

We criss-crossed the Pacific after that. Meeting in anchorages, parting again, finding each other further along the route. The Galapagos. The Marquesas. The vast blue space between islands that makes you understand for the first time how large the world actually is and how small and lucky you are to be moving through it.

Eventually the Pacific brought us to French Polynesia. And French Polynesia brought us to the Tuamotus.

The Tuamotus

If you have never heard of the Tuamotu Archipelago you are not alone. It is a remote chain of atolls sitting low in the Pacific, so low that from a distance you see the palm trees before you see the land. The people who live there have made their life from what the lagoons provide. And what the lagoons provide, above almost everything else, is pearls.

Tahitian pearls. The ones with the blue-black lustre that shifts in different light. The ones with overtones of green and aubergine and the rarest of all, a warm tomato that appears like something the pearl decided for itself. The ones that are never, not once, exactly the same as any other.

I watched from the boat while my future husband pearl dived with the local men. I watched how they moved in the water and how they handled what they brought up and how they talked about the pearls the way people talk about things they have known their whole lives and still find extraordinary.

The people of the Tuamotus were the warmest and most genuinely welcoming I encountered in all my years of sailing. There was a generosity there that had nothing to do with what they had and everything to do with who they were. They shared their water, their knowledge, their table. They let a stranger dive alongside them in their lagoon and treated him as though he belonged there.

I have never forgotten that.

What I understood that day

A Tahitian pearl is not manufactured. It is not designed or engineered or produced in any way that word usually means. It is grown. Inside a living creature, in water so clean the visibility goes down thirty feet, in a lagoon tended by people whose grandparents tended the same water.

Every variable that makes one pearl different from another, the colour, the overtone, the shape, the particular quality of its lustre, is the result of conditions no human fully controls. The temperature of the water that season. The health of the oyster. Something ineffable that the pearl simply decides for itself.

This is why no two are ever the same. And this is why I have never been able to treat them as interchangeable components in a design. Each one I work with is hand selected. Each one has already done something remarkable before it reaches my studio in the rolling hills of New Zealand, a very long way from the lagoons where it began.

Why this matters to how I work

When you hold a piece from the Margalo collection you are holding something with a longer story than it might appear.

A pearl grown in the Tuamotus by people who know those waters the way I know my workbench. Brought into the world by a process that cannot be hurried or replicated or scaled beyond what the lagoon will support. Selected by a jeweller who first fell in love with these pearls watching her future husband dive for them in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Set by hand in solid precious metals in a studio where the maker still finds the whole thing quietly extraordinary after all these years.

I hide in my studio and I create and I dream and I am grateful every single day that I get to indulge this passion. The pearls are a large part of why.

Some things find you when you're not looking. The best things usually do.

Every pearl in the Margalo collection carries this story with it. Hand selected, hand set, made to be worn long after you've forgotten what occasion prompted it.

https://www.porinidesign.com/margalo