Isabel Herrera @isabelherrerajewelry

There is a considerable difference between working somewhere and living somewhere, and an even bigger one between living somewhere and being the place. Isabel Herrera belongs firmly in the third category. She lives, quite literally, inside her workshop on a street in El Raval, surrounded by hammers, files, torches, silver in various stages of becoming something else, and precisely the volume of mess that only makes sense to the person who spent years arranging it. This isn't one of those tidy metaphors people produce in interviews. It is her postal address. You walk in, and it takes about thirty seconds to realise you haven't entered a shop; you've entered somebody's home, which happens to have a workbench in it.

From Venezuela to Massana, by way of a film set in Mexico

How Isabel ended up a silversmith is not a straight line, which tells you something about her already. She came from Venezuela with a career behind her as an actress and model, and discovered jewellery almost sideways, during a stretch of acting work in Mexico. It sounds like a plot twist, but it makes perfect sense: someone used to building a character with their whole body understands quickly that an object is built the same way, by hand, piece by piece, with the same mix of technique and instinct.

She settled in Barcelona in the early 2000s and did what anyone serious about a craft eventually does: learned it properly. She studied silversmithing at Escola Massana, the institution that has spent decades releasing metalworkers into this city, and rounded out her training in the workshops of local jewellers and artists. In 2007 she opened her own: El Taller del Llavadero, in El Raval. She's still there, nearly twenty years on.

She never quite gave up the other life either. Isabel still works as an actress and a model, and the workshop has always functioned as a hybrid, faintly bohemian space where the jeweller's bench coexists with exhibitions and rehearsals. She is one of those people who doesn't hide any of her parts or present them separately, and talking to her is fascinating for exactly that reason: the way she looks at life, at people, and above all at this neighbourhood.

A craft you'd assume had already left

What Isabel does is craftsmanship in the most literal and least decorative sense of the word. Sterling silver, 925, worked entirely in the workshop using traditional techniques: casting, soldering, piercing, setting. Finishes that run from high polish to organic textures, matte surfaces and aged patinas. Clean lines with plenty of character, deeply marked by urban aesthetics and by the multicultural identity of Barcelona. Nothing mass-produced: personalised pieces, made to measure, developed hand in hand with whoever commissions them, starting from one specific idea.

And here is the part of the conversation that stayed with us. Isabel says she has a connection with every person she makes a piece for. That kind of line is easy to dismiss as brochure language, right up until you do the arithmetic: each piece takes her hours, sometimes days. You cannot hold something in your hands for that long without it ending up partly about the person who will wear it. She puts it like this:

"I believe in the beauty of the unique and in exceptional craftsmanship. My commitment is to offer handmade jewellery that brings out each person's individuality."

The difference between buying a piece of jewellery and commissioning one is, in the end, the difference between an object and a talisman. The first you own. The second you carry.

The workshop as part of the neighbourhood

El Raval is full of people who arrived from elsewhere and people who have been here their entire lives, and every so often something better than either happens: someone arrives from elsewhere and becomes so unmistakably of the place that you can no longer describe the neighbourhood without describing her. Isabel is that. She is completely rooted here, and the place shows up in the work: the noise of the street comes in through the workshop door and leaves again, somehow, in the texture of the pieces.

We particularly like the contrast, which is very El Raval: a meticulous, quiet, millimetre-precise craft, practised in the loudest and least millimetric neighbourhood in Barcelona. Both halves need each other. The same workshop in a polished, well-ordered district — the sort of street our Northern European readers can picture immediately, where everything closes at six and nothing is ever slightly broken — would be a different proposition altogether: probably more expensive, and certainly far less interesting.

Go and make yourself a ring (we mean it)

This is the plan we recommend without reservation, and not out of politeness: Isabel runs workshops where you make your own silver ring.

Four hours, in her space, with her tools. You melt the silver, and from there you go through the whole process: measuring the finger, cutting the metal, deciding the texture, engraving a word or two if you want to wear them, shaping, soldering, polishing. You leave with a silver ring you made yourself. Groups of up to seven people, materials included, and something to eat and drink included as well, which in this neighbourhood is not a minor detail. You can come as a group, with friends, with family.

It is probably the fastest way to understand why a handmade piece costs what it costs. You spend four hours making one, and everything else suddenly explains itself.

Why we interviewed her

We design eyewear and she makes jewellery, so strictly speaking we're not in the same trade. What we share is the part that matters: the belief that an object you wear every day, sitting on your face or on your hand, shouldn't come off a production line that has no idea who you are. And a more stubborn belief, that this neighbourhood isn't attractive set dressing for a label, but the place where things are actually made.

Isabel Herrera has spent nearly twenty years proving both.

The full interview is on our Instagram. You'll hear her tell it in her own words, which are always better than ours.

→ Watch the interview on Instagram

→ El Taller del Llavadero — Isabel Herrera Jewelry