A Moment With is a series of conversations and visits into the worlds, spaces, and practices of others, seen through KERN1.
Lauren Strootman, founder of STENN Jewelry and a fourth-generation jeweler, moves between interiors and jewelry with a natural ease. Her work does not sit in one place. It shifts between objects, spaces, and composition. I was invited to Lauren’s home to spend time with her, and understand how these different worlds come together.
When I enter her bright canal-view apartment in the centre of Amsterdam, everything feels calm. Balanced. Lauren tells me that when she moved in, there was nothing here. She shaped it entirely herself. The space is not large, yet it feels complete. Everything that is displayed is chosen and placed with intention. She is guided by a strong sense of proportion, that feels both instinctive and precise. She knows where to find what she has in mind.
Her world is deeply influenced by Art Deco, a continuation of Art Nouveau, where the large, flowing lines remain, but everything excessive is stripped away. What stays is essential. What attracts her most are the juxtapositions, she explains. Round against angular. Dark against light. Opposites placed together in balance. This returns in every part of her home.
In her jewelry, references from her interior world reappear. The Eileen line consists of a chain necklace, bracelet, and earrings, composed of linked elements with two spheres set at either side, inspired by Josef Hoffmann’s Bat chair in her home. The checkered pattern of a cabinet, originally from her parents’ house, later found its way into her packaging. Even the way the diamonds are set in a pair of earrings she designed, angled towards each other, stems from that same cabinet.
We spent hours moving through her space, studying details. Every object in her home carries a story. Lauren lives among many pieces of her grandmother. She pointed out a few: an artwork from the 1970s of a woman in a field, photographed from different distances, accompanied by a handwritten note from the photographer describing how the image was made, a pair of binoculars kept in a large, mysterious black box, a simple, very worn black leather bag. Things that have been used and carried over time, holding an elegance that cannot be replicated.
Lauren grew up surrounded by these kinds of objects, alongside the jewelry of her mother, who is a gemologist trained in New York. Together they founded STENN. Both her grandfather and great-grandfather were diamantaires. Still, her path developed gradually. She studied commercial economics, moving between disciplines, collecting references, refining her eye, before slowly finding her way back to what felt natural.
Lauren rarely sits down to design. She is constantly creating, taking things in, browsing through the many books she collects from the market on Waterlooplein, just next to her home. People ask her to design interiors, to source furniture, to shape spaces. Ideas for jewelry emerge from this process.
Each piece STENN creates is developed closely together with a small atelier in Italy. She mentioned that sometimes an idea feels right in isolation, but changes entirely once it is placed on the body. How something sits, how it moves, how it is worn becomes just as important as the idea itself. The process becomes a dialogue. STENN remains a small and intentional line. Rather than expanding quickly, Lauren chooses to give each design the attention it deserves, letting more people discover the collection over time.
What she values most is how jewelry continues to live alongside the person who wears it. Over time, pieces gather traces of use, of movement, of life. And yet, they can always be restored, polished back to their original state, as if new again. That ability to renew while still carrying a history is what makes jewelry so enduring to her.
For this meeting, I brought a selection of Chanel jackets. As Lauren approached them, she observed them with the same attention she gives her own work, looking at the construction, the balance, and the relationship between material and form. She even discovered that if you hold the 1997 Spring Summer alphabet jacket against the light, the white printed logo lining appears through the back, like a secret code. She wore them together with her STENN jewelry and a vintage bracelet from her mother.
The jackets worn by Lauren, the elongated classic little black 'Alphabet' jacket from the 1997 Spring Summer collection, an unlined grey bouclé cardi-jacket from 1992, and an understated festive black bouclé top with the famous 'scoubidou' trim from the 1994 Spring Summer collection, are available in the KERN1 online store. Find Lauren's jewelry at Stenn.
