Walking in the front door and into a tastefully appointed room — deep blue walls, hardwood floor, leather couch, artfully arranged plants and furniture — you hear the banging from below. Take the steps down to the basement, and you see a group of teenagers who are intently but happily focused on their work, as indie rock music plays softly on the sound system. The youths are standing at a work bench and using rawhide mallets to hammer pieces of silver.

They are in the process of creating a half sphere that they’ll eventually solder together with another half, creating a jewelry piece that can serve as an earring or a pendant.

Teacher Emily Marquis walks around, looking at each project in process and kindly offering guidance.

This is an average weekend day at the Marquis Jewelry Academy in Stonington. Marquis and her husband, Cal McNamara, opened the business in early 2020 near Stonington Borough and recently moved to a larger space, with a first-floor showroom and basement workshop, off Taugwonk Spur Road in Stonington.

Marquis is a professional goldsmith and is an instructor in the fabrication of precious metal jewelry. McNamara got into the art as well after meeting Marquis.

The duo makes and sells their own jewelry, even as their Marquis Jewelry Academy classes have blossomed, with sessions for beginners and for those who have developed more advanced skills.

“I enjoy the ebb and flow; each part of our business seems to have a season when it’s the priority,” Marquis says.

Making it your own

After class, the teen students spoke about making their own jewelry. Some were wearing the necklaces they had just finished, having placed a smokey quartz into the settings they had fabricated. The necklace took three classes that were each three hours long.

They’ve learned how much work goes into creating this kind of jewelry, and they say it’s fun to wear items that they have actually made.

Emory Anderson, 15, of Stonington, says that while the projects are established by Marquis and McNamara, the students have a lot of creative freedom within that; “You can make it your own,” she says.

Maya Flaherty, 13, of Stonington, spoke about how she decided to take the class: she got interested in funky jewelry when she was a kid and wanted to be able to make it.

“I always thought it was so cool,” she says.

And, she says, although the process can be frustrating at certain points, it’s amazing when she sees it coming together and then transforming into the finished product.

Creating their wedding rings

The Marquis Jewelry Academy also offers sessions where an engaged couple can make their own wedding bands.

That’s what Sara Mikovic and Tim Stankewicz of Groton recently did. The couple, who both work at Electric Boat, knew they wanted to wed but weren’t attracted to the big-party aspects of the event, Mikovic says. They thought they might elope but, if they did, they would still need to get rings. With that in mind, Mikovic Googled jewelry shops in the area and noticed Marquis’s website.

“The first thing I saw was that they do a wedding band workshop, and I was like, ‘This is it,’” Mikovic recalls, noting that she and Stankewicz enjoy working with their hands and liked the idea of doing something meaningful. It was also wonderful that they could have this experience together, making each other’s wedding bands, she says.

“I was like, ‘We have to do this, this is so cool.’ He was like, ‘Oh, yeah, absolutely,’” she says.

It was even more tempting when they learned that they could actually repurpose old pieces of jewelry for the rings.

“We have dozens of half earring sets and rings nobody wears anymore, just little pieces of jewelry that sit there and don’t get used,” Mikovic says.

The process went like this, she recalls: They melted down the old pieces of jewelry from their families and poured the gold into a mold. That resulted in an ingot, which is like a small gold rod. They repeatedly rolled that out until it was the thickness they wanted for the ring bands.

They employed a measurement tool to figure out their ring sizes and how long the bands needed to be. Then, by hand, they used pliers to bend segments of the gold into a circular shape, soldering the two ends together. They dropped the rings onto what looks like a cylindrical pyramid and hammered them until they became perfect circular shapes.

All told, it took them about five or six hours, although the process can sometimes be completed as quickly as three.

“We aren’t in love with the idea of jewelry and things, but when we get to do it ourselves, we loved it because we put the work into it. … It was just really a bonding experience,” Mikovic says.

And Stankewicz has been working on creating an engagement ring for Mikovic, keeping the design a surprise.

Teaching the foundations

The classes vary in price. The beginner’s class, which consists of seven three-hour sessions, is $525. A private lesson for an engagement ring runs three hours and is $375.

What people learn at the Marquis Jewelry Academy is hand fabrication with silver, gold and platinum. The beginners’ course focuses on the foundations, including how to use the tools on the jewelers bench, how to forge, saw, polish, solder, and set stones.

“For us, we kind of approach it very much like these are the foundations. What you decide to do with it from there is endless. We can continue to teach you fun projects or, if you decide you want to really dive into the design and the marketing and all that, we can help with that, too,” Marquis says.

‘Luxury to be lived in’

Meanwhile, Marquis and McNamara describe the jewelry that the two of them create and sell as “luxury to be lived in.” The idea is that people love the pieces so much, they might wear them around the house just because they feel good in them.

“We have clients that bought large gold necklaces, large gold bracelets, handmade stuff that they just rocked” at home during the pandemic, McNamara says.

As fine jewelers, they use predominantly 14 and 18 karat gold, as well as some silver and platinum, depending on what clients are looking for.

“But it’s very much high-quality, heavy, bold, modern jewelry with lots of influences from historic, classic pieces,” Marquis says.

Being a goldsmith

Marquis has been teaching jewelry for about a decade, starting back when she was living in the Washington, D.C., area and ran a school with her uncle, who is also a goldsmith.

“When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a painter,” Marquis says. “My uncle was a goldsmith, and he told me, ‘If you don’t want to be a starving artist, then you should be a goldsmith. Because no matter what the economy is doing, if you’re good enough at your job, you’ll always have work to do. When the economy is poor and not doing well, people will need things repaired, they’ll want to melt things down and turn them into new things, they’ll turn them into wedding bands. When the economy is doing great and people are buying, you can make them custom goods … If you’re skilled enough in all the right categories, you can just ebb and flow the whole time.’”

In 2015, Marquis became a full-time bench jeweler for a business; a bench jeweler is usually tucked away in the back of a jewelry store and does repairs, stone settings and so on, she says.

After three years of that, she became a full-time jeweler making and selling her own pieces directly to clients, and she began teaching. (In D.C., she taught for JewelryClassDC.)

She and McNamara are originally from Connecticut — she from Cromwell, he from Berlin — and met when they were both living in D.C. in their 20s.

After they began dating, McNamara started learning from Marquis about making jewelry. When they relocated back to the Nutmeg State in 2019, McNamara left his IT career behind to become a full-time goldsmith. Another benefit of that: working in the same field allows them to spend more time together.

They decided to settle in this area after becoming familiar with southeastern Connecticut when visiting a childhood friend of McNamara’s who lives in Niantic.

They first established the Marqus Jewelry Academy in a space just outside of Stonington Borough. Their opening was scheduled for March 14, 2020.

“We had kind of invested all of our savings and all of our effort into this new venture, which was a 300-square-foot classroom, and that’s all we had. Then on (that) Monday, the governor shut the state down,” Marquis says, laughing ruefully.

It was obviously an uncertain time. There was no teaching to be had, and no one was sure what the economy, never mind the jewelry business, was going to look like in the near future.

After a couple of months, though, their customers started showing up once more, and Marquis and McNamara were teaching again by June.

The duo has since moved to a bigger location that boast two floors of 800 square feet, as opposed to the original two 300-square-foot spaces.

They also spent time renovating the showroom in the new location. It is now an inviting space that feels more like a comfortable, chic living room than a business.

“More people are starting to drop by and stop in and get recommendations, and we wanted something that spoke a little bit more to our brand than, you know, just taking a bunch of boxes out and putting them on the table,” Marquis says. “It makes it more of an experience.”

As for the joy inherent in creating jewelry, Marquis says, “This craft to me, like art, is about making something beautiful. Unlike a painting on a wall, or a piece of pottery in your kitchen, we wear these pieces on us, a billboard to the world expressing ourselves."

The details

What: Marquis Jewelry Academy

Where: 32 Taugwonk Spur Road, 1A, Stonington

Contact: (860) 214-1118, marquisjewelryacademy.com