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How Much Does It Cost to Remodel Inherited Gold? An Honest Answer
It usually arrives in the same way. Someone opens a small box on the table between us, or sends a photograph taken on a kitchen worktop, and says: this was my mother's. It was special to her but I never wear it. Could you make it into something I would?
And then, almost always, the second question. How much would that cost?
I understand why people want a number. It is the one thing that would make the decision easy. But I have never been able to give one quickly, and I have come to think that the jewellers who can are not doing anyone a kindness.
So this is the long answer. It is more useful than a figure.
Why no one can give you a straight price
A remodelling commission is not one job. It is a sequence of decisions, and each one moves the cost.
What metal is the original? Different carat golds behave differently to one another, and all of them behave differently to platinum and to silver. How was the piece made: cast, stamped, formed from sheet, or cast from grain? How much of it is there, enough to make what you have in mind, or will more need to be added? Are there stones, and can they be reset, or has forty years of wear left them chipped at the girdle where nobody thought to look?
Then the design itself. A band that carries a single stone is one kind of work. A piece with movement in it, or texture, or several stones held at different heights, is another kind entirely, and the hours are not comparable.
When a website tells you that remodelling starts at £500, that figure is real, but it describes the simplest possible version of the job. A single stone lifted into a plain new mount. If what you are picturing is anything other than that, the number you have read has told you almost nothing, and you will find that out later, which is the worst time to find it out.
I would rather tell you now.
Sometimes the answer is much smaller than you think
Not every piece needs remodelling. Some of the best outcomes I have been part of cost very little.
A ring that has been in a drawer for twenty years, properly cleaned, can look like something else entirely. Stones do not lose their life, they lose their light, and giving it back changes how someone sees a piece they had stopped looking at.
Sometimes it is one small alteration rather than a rebuild. A setting made safe. A single detail changed. Something adjusted so a piece can be worn again instead of guarded.
And sometimes it is simpler still. A single earring, its pair lost years ago, becomes a pendant with a bail attached, and something that had been kept out of loyalty starts being worn.
Knowing which of these is the right answer is most of the job. It is why I would rather look at a piece and talk it through than quote from a photograph. Often what someone needs is not a new piece at all, and I would rather tell them that.
The question I ask instead
When someone asks me what a commission costs, I usually answer with a question, and it is not the one they expect.
How much were you thinking of spending?
People sometimes hesitate at that, because it sounds as though I am working out what I can charge. I am not, I am trying to work out how I can create for you.
Think about buying a car. If you tell me you want a car, I cannot help you, because a car might cost five hundred pounds or it might cost a hundred thousand, and both of those are cars. They will both get you to Llandeilo. But the moment you tell me roughly where you are, I can tell you what is possible, what is not, and what I would honestly recommend. And I can do it in one conversation rather than four.
A budget is not a limit. It is a starting point. It tells me whether we are talking about resetting your mother's stone into something simple you will wear every day, or whether we are designing something considerably more involved. Both are good pieces of work. They are just different pieces of work.
Most remodelling commissions I take on begin in the low thousands and go up from there. The pieces where I can do my best work, where the design has somewhere to go, sit a good deal higher. I would rather say that at the start than let someone get attached to an idea I cannot make for them.
What your gold is actually worth
This is the part that is hardest to say, and the part I most want you to know before you go any further.
The gold in your jewellery box is almost certainly worth less than you imagine, but also worth a great deal more than any figure could describe.
Those two things are both true and they are not in conflict.
By weight, an old nine carat ring is not a great deal of metal. Melted down and refined, it will not go as far as people expect. And using your own metal is not always the cheaper route: old gold has to be assessed, melted, and often refined before it can be worked, and depending on what it is alloyed with, that process can cost more in time than simply starting with new metal. There are commissions where I have had to tell someone that using their own gold would make the piece more expensive, not less.
If there is metal left over, that value comes back to you. Sometimes that makes a real difference to the final figure. Sometimes there is nothing left over at all.
But none of that is why people remodel. Nobody brings me their father's treasured signet ring because they are trying to save money. They bring it because they want to wear him and be close to him. The value that matters here has never been the value on the scales, and I have never once had that conversation go any other way.
What you are paying for
Not the metal. The metal is the smallest part of most quotes.
You are paying for the time it takes to sit down and understand what the piece is for, before anything is drawn. For the ideas, the possibilities, the designs themselves, and the versions that get discarded. For the making: the hours at the bench creating something that will do justice to the memory.
And for the responsibility. When you hand over something that cannot be replaced, you are asking someone to take a risk on your behalf. Old stones can be fragile. Old settings can hide problems. That risk is carried in my workshop, and it is carried carefully, and it is part of what the work costs.
When remodelling is the right answer
It is right when the piece has a story you cannot let go of, and a form you will never wear.
It is right when there is enough there to work with: enough metal, or a stone worth building around.
It is right when you want the thing itself, not the saving. Come to it for the sentiment and it will almost always be worth it. Come to it for the economics and it very often will not.
And it is right when you are ready to hand it over, which is a bigger step than people expect and should never be rushed.
When it isn't, and what I would suggest instead
Sometimes I look at what is in the box and what someone is hoping for, and the honest answer is that a commission is not the way to get there.
The gold is thin. The stones are damaged. The design that would truly suit them would cost more than they want to spend, and the version that fits the budget would be a compromise neither of us would be pleased with.
When that happens, I say so. And then I usually walk them into the gallery.
Because the pieces in my collections are not lesser work. Every one of them began as a single thought: a line of Welsh poetry, the weave of a carthen blanket, a word that carries something English cannot. They are made in the same workshop, to the same standard, with the same thinking behind every decision. The only difference is that the story was already there, waiting, rather than brought in from outside.
If you would like to see where those pieces come from, start with Cofio, built around a poem by Waldo Williams, or Gyda'n Gilydd, meaning together, etched in my own handwriting.
More than once someone has arrived intending to commission and left holding something from the cabinet that suited them far better than anything I would have designed to a brief. That is not a consolation prize. That is the right piece finding the right person, which is what all of this is for.
And if it isn't sentimental
Not everything in the box carries a person with it. Sometimes what turns up is simply old: a chain that broke years ago, a ring inherited from someone you never really knew, gold you have no feeling about at all.
That is a different question, and it deserves a different answer. I will write about those options properly another time.
Where to begin
If you have something in a box and you have been wondering about it for years, you do not need to arrive with a design. You need only tell me about the person it belonged to and roughly what you were thinking of spending. Everything else follows from there.
And if the honest answer turns out to be that a commission is not the right route for you, I will tell you that too. It costs you nothing to ask.
Start a conversation about a commission →
Mari Thomas designs and makes from her workshop and gallery in Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire.