Elena Votsi Infuses Her Creations With Heritage and Whimsy

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Elena Votsi Infuses Her Creations With Heritage and Whimsy

When the yachts and sailboats and ferries dock in the compact harbor of the Greek island of Hydra, there is one destination that the rich and famous and fashionable often seek: the Elena Votsi boutique.

And those in search of jewelry and objects that reflect Grecian heritage find a welcome in the two small rooms of the 320-square-foot shop. “She’s my favorite artist,” said Tara Subkoff, an ********* actress who had stopped by one afternoon in July to say hello to Ms. Votsi. “She always does something special, something unexpected. I mean, who puts a diamond on a crab claw?”

Ms. Votsi does, and the combination of her unusual creations and warm personality has attracted a loyal following of friends and collectors. “My mother had a bracelet by Elena,” said Anna Goulandris, an interior designer from London who also stopped by the shop, as she has every summer for more than 25 years.

She now collects Ms. Votsi’s jewelry because, she said, “I love that Elena is respectful of culture and traditions.”

“She takes something symbolic,” Ms. Goulandris paused to look around the room, “like the evil eye, and represents it in so many ways.” She motioned toward a wall hanging, drinking glasses, pendants, stacks of bracelets, all featuring versions of the stylized eye that is ubiquitous in Greece, intended to ward off harm.

Ms. Votsi, 59, grew up in Athens and her family had a vacation home on Hydra, an hour or so away by boat. Her father was a captain of commercial vessels, and “my mother and I would often accompany him on his trips to places like Genoa or Pakistan.”

“We would always go to flea markets,” she said, where she recalled being drawn to displays of jewelry.

“As a child I started to wear jewelry, made of plastic, for fun,” she said. Later, “I decided I wanted to make jewelry and I also wanted to paint. I dreamed of doing both.”

For five years she studied painting, drawing and mosaics at the Athens School of Fine Arts, then received a master’s degree in jewelry from the Royal College of Art in London.

“I returned to Greece with big ideas for designing jewelry, but I couldn’t find any work,” Ms. Votsi said. “So I opened my own store in 1991” — the one she was standing in as she spoke, although she had only the back room at the time — “and started very slowly to work.”

Now, she also has a larger boutique, also at the port, as well as a store in Athens, but the original site has remained her flagship. The interior’s stone walls are painted glossy white, the better to set off her colorful creations.

Ms. Votsi has always used a variety of materials for her jewelry: shells, enamel, precious and semiprecious gemstones, and actual stones. She works in both silver and 18-karat gold, although she said she prefers the latter. “It’s soft and feels good against the skin,” she said.

Her motifs are drawn from her heritage and surroundings. For example, she was inspired by the crosses, shaped like four-leaf clovers, on the wrought iron gate of the monastery a few doors away. A thin, straight rod — a design she has used on several pieces — was based on “the line of the mountains I see from my bedroom window,” she said, and she also favors the shape of a ball: “The sphere is perfection. It’s the sun.”

The silhouettes of the local donkeys, which carry bags and boxes up into the hills, are on pillows and plates in her housewares line. “The donkeys are in ****** against a white background,” she said, “like when you see their dark saddles hanging on a white wall.”

Ms. Votsi admitted that she had a weakness for rings, thanks to the ********* artist Helen Marden, whom she once saw strolling in the port and who had since become a customer. “She always wears big rings,” Ms. Votsi said, “and she is so striking, she has such presence.”

The designer said she also liked how “rings can play with light and movement,” and she demonstrated by moving her fingers, covered with rings, to encircle her face.

Another customer, Fanélie Phillips, had entered the shop and was eyeing a necklace of gold ******. “It reminds me of the gold bead necklace my sister and I received for our first communions,” Ms. Phillips said, referring to her sister, the fashion designer Julie de Libran. “It’s a piece of jewelry traditionally presented to young ****** by their families in the south of France to mark a special occasion.”

Ms. Phillips’s husband, Simon Phillips, admired another necklace with nine antique keys dangling from its gold links. Ms. Votsi had decorated each key, adding a touch of gold or embedding a ruby or a diamond. Could Ms. Votsi create a version with thicker links and only one key, Mr. Phillips asked?

Of course she could. She often does custom work, which fits nicely into her approach to her jewelry designs, most of which are one of a kind, she said: “I don’t want to repeat myself. I want to go on to the next design.” (This seems to explain why so many items on her website are marked “sold out.”)

And this year, she said, she plans to offer Christmas ornaments for the first time.

Over the years, Ms. Votsi has created jewelry for many fashion houses (she would not name names). She also has collaborated on the design of gifts, jewelry, awards and commemorative medals for cultural institutions including the Acropolis Museum, the National Historical Museum of Greece and the Museum of Cycladic Art, as well as the island of Hydra and the city of Athens.

One of Ms. Votsi’s best known works had some additional exposure recently: In 2004, her design was chosen for the Athens Olympics medals, and an adaptation of her winning composition has been used ever since on the front of the Summer Olympics medals,

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this summer.

“I showed the Goddess Nike in the middle of the Panathenaic Stadium, where the first modern Olympic Games were revived in 1896,” Ms. Votsi said. “Nike is holding a laurel wreath, according to the myth, to put it on the head of the winner.”

That achievement was special to her for another reason, too: “The day that they announced that I was the winner of the competition, I also had a call from my doctor that I was pregnant with my son, Nikolas. That was maybe the best day of my life.”

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