DURGHAM ALAHMAR
Founding Father
Back in the mid-seventies and at the young age of 21, the brand's founder, Durgham Alahmar, entered the business as a traditional bench goldsmith in order to support his family after his father passed away. Driven by the pursuit of craft, a fixation on details and an intense devotion to succeed during the days when Old Damascus was the backbone of the region's gold & jewelry industry, his work started to earn local and regional recognition.
Filled with the spirit of a pioneer during the invisible-set diamond trend that overtook the Middle-East region, importing master artisans and craftsmen from the Kingdom of Thailand, Mr. Alahmar became the very first -and for a long time the only- jeweler to supply the regional market demand with local made invisible-set jewelry. Producing works that caught the eye of the region's elite, he was soon regarded as a pioneering entrepreneur of his time in the Levant.
As time progressed, the four-story atelier located in an ancient french-architecture building in 'Almasbak Aljouani' street in Bab Touma at the very heart of old Damascus was soon extending above and beyond, supplying Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt with masterpiece creations and starting to be recognized and the family name 'ALAHMAR' and 'jewelry' became synonymous as one.
The rapid expansion continued onwards and upwards until reaching a total halt in the year 2011. The unfortunate Syrian civil-war broke, forcing the family into diaspora and setting the scene for chapter two..
“The details of a work of art are not just the details, they are the work of art itself. If what we do didn't look perfectly articulate and aesthetic on a microscopic scale, it won’t reach its full artistic potential. Call it the X factor, the butterfly effect, or call me the obsessed perfectionist that I am, but the minute details from conception to completion are infinitely the most important to me." Says Durgham.
The rapid expansion continued onwards and upwards until reaching a total halt in the year 2011. The unfortunate Syrian civil-war broke, forcing the family into diaspora and setting the scene for chapter two..