Caroline Van Hoek Mategoh Cuff Bracelet Polished

The 18-carat gold Mategoh Cuff Bracelet, from jewellery designer Caroline van Hoek, combines the heights of mid-century French design with contemporary jewellery.

Van Hoek’s Mategoh collection takes inspiration from the furniture of renowned French designer Mathieu Matégot, who used repeated patterns of perforation across metal sheets to achieve a levity within his domestic designs. This bracelet was inspired by a Matégot magazine trolley, its strips of metal juxtaposing positive and negative space, and its pronounced joins inspiring the bracelet’s hinges. Van Hoek made the bracelet specifically with three hinges, not the usual two, to emphasise the third’s purely decorative quality.

Van Hoek contrasts Matégot’s machine-made, metal furniture with her own handmade process. It is not her intention to copy the French master’s technique, but to translate the simplicity of the design in her own way, to hint at the art historical reference.