Diamond Office

The diamond office is the trading floor where rough is sorted, weighed, valued and offered — the quiet engine room of Antwerp behind the curtains of the jewellery world.

Here, under flat northern light, parcels are opened and graded grain by grain; a stone’s promise is read in the rough long before a single facet is cut. It is unglamorous, exacting work, and the whole trade turns on it: nothing reaches a window or a hand until it has first passed across one of these tables.