Off the California Cuff
Author:Sarah Virginia WhiteRon Radziner, cofounder of Los Angeles architecture firm Marmol Radziner, sees his company’s 5,000-square-foot metal shop—housed in a wooden-truss industrial warehouse south of downtown—as just one more piece of heavy artillery in his design-and-fabrication arsenal. So three years ago, when he couldn’t find a piece of jewelry that he liked, Radziner looked to industrial shear presses to cut his own metal bracelet. He gifted it to a client, says Robin Cottle, Radziner’s wife and a graphic designer, “and all of a sudden, everyone was asking about the cuff Ron had designed.”
Intrigued, Cottle stepped into the shop and began tweaking the proportions of the pieces, adapting them for a woman’s wrist, experimenting with different finishes and adding new styles (such as rings and pendants). “Little by little, we ended up creating a jewelry line,” Cottle says. For a collection so thoroughly steeped in the clean lines and metallic heft one might expect of an architecture firm, a bronze cuff in the shape of California presented a challenge.
By playing with the angle of the state silhouette, however, Cottle created an abstraction that felt perfectly at home in the modernist line. “It doesn’t immediately read as the state of California, but you still get the natural coastline contrasting with the angular, manmade territory lines,” Cottle says. “The pure form of the state is just perfect. It doesn’t need any embellishments.”
This was originally published in California Home + Design’s Fall 2013 issue. Click here to subscribe.
