Saudi's Charmaleena Pays Tribute to the Ageless & the Changeless

The Golden Collection, one of the Saudi fine-jewellery house Charmaleena's signature lines, began with the vintage baguette tennis bracelet that belonged to the mother of its founders, sisters Leena and Hala El Khereiji. When Leena and Hala came to build the collection out, they went back to it.

"Our mother's vintage baguette tennis bracelet is one of the pieces we both remember most," the sisters tell SceneStyled. "Instead of recreating it, we reinterpreted its signature baguette setting into contemporary designs. Today, it has become one of the defining details of the Golden Collection."

Charmaleena was launched by Leena and Hala in Jeddah in 2012. Leena serves as the Creative Director and Designer of the house while Hala works as its Managing Director. Both sisters were trained abroad before returning to Saudi Arabia and the house has since won a national cultural award for fashion. For them, reproduction is not the key focus. What interests the founders is the way an object maintains the spirit of its predecessors while taking up a new shape.

Now, as it prepares to open a boutique in Riyadh, it is expanding the Golden Collection. "The Golden Collection represents the foundation of Charmaleena," Leena says. "As we prepare to open our Riyadh boutique, it felt like the right time to expand one of our strongest collections rather than introduce something entirely new."Fine jewellery is normally sold on the size and quality of its stones. Charmaleena, however, pays attention to the meaning rendered to stone. "Rather than designing shapes for aesthetics, we created symbols that stand for values such as strength, growth, belonging and memory", Leena explains.

The Golden Collection turns those symbols into a token of identity. The Palm carries growth, belonging and Saudi heritage, and the house treats it as part of its own identity and name. The Shield, drawn from the mother's bracelet, is for strength and protection. The Frame holds memory and the people inside it, and the Oval and Geometric forms borrow lines from architecture. Binding them together is the baguette setting Leena reworked from that precious heirloom bracelet. "It creates a common thread across the collection, while allowing every symbol to maintain its own personality," she says.

Pieces from Golden Collection allow personalisation with names, dates, symbols and photographs. "We just provide the canvas and our clients give pieces their meanings", Leena says. "Because everyone has his or her own story."The goal is a unique longevity of the pieces. "Timelessness means creating jewellery that is above trends," she says. "Pieces that can be worn every day, passed from generation to generation, and remain meaningful through all the stages of your life."

That way of working met a brief this summer when Bab Samhan, a Luxury Collection hotel located in the restored mud-brick houses of Diriyah, named after the gate of the old town, invited Charmaleena to create a piece that would have the same background.

Leena started with the hotel building. "From the moment Bab Samhan contacted us, I began researching how to unite the identity of the place and the identity of Charmaleena."

What she settled on was a story, drawn, in her words, from "our heritage, our poetry, our culture and our homes": that of Qays and Laila, the Najdi lovers of classical Arabic verse who were forbidden to marry, and whose separation turned Qays into a poet and earned him the name Majnun Laila, Laila's madman.

Locket of Love, the latest addition to Charmaleena's Tales & Treasures collection, is made of 18-karat gold and diamonds, and its face draws the geometric lines of traditional Najdi doors. Like a door, this locket opens. "Just as a door opens to reveal what is behind it, the locket opens to show you something deeply personal," Leena says.

Inside there could be two names, a photograph, a ruby, or a message. Engraved across the locket there is a line Qays wrote for Laila:

وما حبُّ الديارِ شغفنَ قلبي … ولكن حبُّ مَن سكَنَ الديارا

"It was never the dwellings that held my heart, but only the one who lived within them."

For Leena, these verses and the hotel building speak the same truth. "From our homes and our poetry, an eternal love story has been born," she says. "A story reminding us that places find their beauty in the people we love."

Since the locket bears two names, the oldest love story in the language becomes the story of the wearer, and the names can stand for couples, siblings, parents and children, and friends. As Leena puts it, "We create pieces that honour the moments of our lives, that grow with the wearers and become heirlooms passed from generation to generation."