Diamond in the rough

Recent shots of his "muse", Christina Aguilera, are tacked up and Stephen Webster perches on a huge taupe sofa in his office at Garrard. The new creative director of this most English of firms, he moved himself and 30-odd staff into the building only two weeks ago.

The stains on the sofas are mildly irritating but to be expected when you throw an emporium-warming party and the rabble is led by Kate Moss. She declared that she doesn't want any other ring than a recently designed lobster one that crawls decadently halfway up the wearer's finger and salaciously wiggles.

With a man at the helm who designs for Cameron Diaz and Charlize Theron and is best friends with Tracey Emin and designer Kelly Hoppen, if ever there was a chance for Garrard to move into the 21st century, this is it.

Webster may look like a slightly ageing glam rocker but he has built up a business that has more than 20 stores around the globe from New York to Seoul, Kazhakstan to Moscow - not forgetting Yekaterinburg in Siberia.

It's something of a coup for Garrard - which launches his debut collection next Wednesday - to have signed him up at all. Despite its heritage, the company's recent history has been less glorious, particularly when Jade Jagger was creative director.

After being sold and merged with Asprey in 2006, Garrard had to be rescued from bankruptcy. Its new owner is private equity fund Yucaipa, run by Bill Clinton's rather enigmatic supermarket tycoon friend Ron Burkle.

After losing its status as crown jeweller to Kent-based Harry Collins last year, Garrard has slowly been putting things in place, "one of them being me", Webster points out. It also retains a royal warrant from the Prince of Wales.

"People don't really know that much about Garrard. Historically they did, but there's been quite a bit of confusion about the brand over the past 10 years. When I think about my early days in this business, Garrard was like, the place. You couldn't get any grander and more establishment."

For all of his falling in and out of jets and nightclubs, Webster is raucously down to earth. As an ordinary boy from Gravesend it amuses him that Garrard was the first door he knocked on back in the days when Liz Taylor would buy his work but no one in England quite got it.

Fifteen years on, Burkle, a friend of Christina Aguilera, already owned a stake in Stephen Webster. And after Webster accessorised the Lady Marmalade Moulin Rouge video for the pop star, they also became good friends.

The star piece of his latest "Jewels Verne" collection is a massive fish tail necklace. Other pieces include a huge black-opal crab ring, and a shrimp ring that looks as though it might slither off your finger or give someone a nip.

Like all the old-school luxury brands, Garrard has struggled to appear relevant in the modern market place. Instead of dwelling on this, or on the unfavourable economic climate (De Beers thinks it is so bad that it recently suspended operations at its Botswana diamond mines), Webster is optimistic.

But he's not planning to turn the brand into another rock '*' roll jeweller. "That's the last thing I would do, and when I said that, everyone here said, 'Thank God.'" He thinks Garrard could again become the British equivalent of Tiffany, which does huge business not just in jewellery but also in silver and glass.

Particularly when under the management of the Sultan of Brunei's brother, Webster says Garrard was too obsessed with becoming modern. "The real fundamentals, things like engagement rings, have been a bit neglected. If a family stays with you for generations, then that's what the jewellery should be about. There's virtually nothing else in life that gets handed on, that has so much connected with it."

Webster's life hasn't always been so successful or straightforward. Now 49, he has been a jeweller for more than 30 years. After he got into his local grammar school, his parents - his father was a draughtsman - were disappointed when he didn't want to do his A-levels. "In the end they were brilliant. I said it didn't mean I wanted to stop my education ..." He got into Medway College of Art and immediately fell in love with what he was doing. "The first day I started to make jewellery, I couldn't believe that this was going to be my job," he recalls. "Me and my brother [who now oversees production] were the same. My dad said: 'You would spend hours looking into a bloody rockpool.'"

In 1981 he left recession-racked Britain and his own tiny business to work for a Canadian "gem adventurer", Michael Ridding, who a friend had put him in touch with. "We landed in the middle of the Rocky Mountains. It was like, 'Hell! Where on earth are we going to sell jewellery here?'"

In fact, it was Alberta, site for the Winter Olympics and packed with rich people. Ridding trotted around the globe and threw lavish stones in his protégé's direction.

Their association lasted for eight years but by 1989 Webster was back in the UK, starting from scratch and trying to establish a business under his own name.

He was already married to his first wife and by 1992, the couple had a daughter, Amy, now 17. However, the turning point in his career came after his second marriage to Russian-born Assia in 1998.

She is the daughter of a scientist and linguist from St Petersburg but left for New York at the age of 18. She is fluent in five languages and a job trading equities followed, and by the time she first met Webster in London in 1991 at a Goldsmith's Company lunch she was selling art for Christie's auction house. At the time the Webster shop was, he jokes, like a bejewelled "cupboard" and it wasn't until after they married that he drafted in Assia to work for him full time.

Around this time, Webster's friend Brian Message, the co-manager of Radiohead, applied some music industry thinking to the dusty world of jewellery. He encouraged Webster to use his personality instead of hiding behind the work.

Message slipped Madonna a Webster catalogue. One shot of her wearing his £3,250 over-sized Crystal Haze ring was the trigger for his launch into the media limelight. Webster was credited with having "reinvented the cocktail ring" and had more orders than his tiny firm could handle. "It was like there wasn't a single New York socialite not wearing that ring," he says.

As the buzz went around, keeping up was hard work, especially when, in 2000, Madonna commissioned wedding rings for herself and Guy Ritchie. The next eight years saw him consolidate the business with clients such as Johnny Depp, Jennifer Lopez, Jay Z and even Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne.

Now in his new office at Garrard, how will Webster cope with the recession and its effect on his clientele? Gesturing out of the window, he says the days of wealthy Russians careering down the streets of Mayfair just "blowing it ... well, I don't want to say that they are finished, but they've had a big dent, that's for sure".

As far as his own business goes, thanks to a decision in 2007 to make a more affordable silver collection (priced from £150 to £1,500) so far Webster hasn't had to downsize.

Part of Webster's success is partly due to his zeal for a punishing, almost permanent world tour - he estimates he has flown a million miles with BA. Assia jokes that this is the only basis on which they could work together. They live in Marylebone but at weekends disappear to their house by the sea in Walmer in his native Kent.

Though no longer a rock-pooling kid (a childhood sign of his obsession with detail and love of fishing for treasure), Webster is still inspired by all things oceanic.

At the weekends the whole family, including their 10-year-old daughter Nika and Amy, are still often to be found rock-pooling. "Amy's like this beautiful, glamorous 17-year-old but we will all be there, still doing it. It's quite funny."

As with artists and their collectors, Webster can't see expensive jewellery succeeding without face-to-face interaction.

"If you are spending many thousands then it seems bizarre to me that you might never meet the person behind it," he says. In the past few weeks he has been in Japan and Basel, Switzerland, while there's a new store to check out in Puerto Banus, on the Costa del Sol.

For Garrard, however, the most intriguing possibilities are closer to home. He relishes the company's romantic history: "Prince Albert used to get really involved with the pieces. Now that stuff is Victorian but then it was modern." So what about that Crown Jeweller title? "I'd like to think that a member of the royal family would still commission a Garrard creation in the future."

In October, Assia and Prince William were seen in conversation at Whisky Mist. So can Webster see Kate Middleton in something by Garrard, who made Princess Diana's engagement ring, or something by Stephen Webster?

"Ooooh," he says carefully, "I think he would buy a Garrard ring. I think so. I think it would be good if he did. Because it's had a long association with his family and if you look back, Garrard has done some amazing things ... And anyway, I can't say any more than that. Other than we do a good job."

And with a big laugh, he's gone - off for a photoshoot wearing a New Romantic-style shirt and a generous smattering of his rocks, leaving me happily trying on the azure-coloured crab and the big shrimp.