Those who followed the press tour for “Wuthering Heights” will have clocked Jacob Elordi’s now much-discussed grill. The custom piece, created by Maison Raksha founder Jonathan Raksha, was engraved by hand with the letters ‘C’ and ‘H’ and set with two diamonds – a subtle tribute to the film’s central lovers, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff.
But it was not the first time Raksha and Elordi had collaborated. The two were introduced while the actor was in Toronto filming Frankenstein, shortly after his appointment in 2024 as global ambassador of Bottega Veneta. Elordi had initially approached Raksha about commissioning grillz. “On that visit, I showed him some watches,” Raksha recalls. “He came back the following year for the Toronto International Film Festival and said, ‘I want to pick up one of those watches that I tried on.’”
The watch in question was an Audemars Piguet Bamboo Day-Date Moonphase. “It’s quite rare,” Raksha tells me. “So rare that even Audemars Piguet can’t give us a definitive number of how many were produced.”
It also happened to be the first watch he ever bought for himself – the foundation of a collection he has built gradually over the course of his career, now standing at 20 timepieces. “Only for the very right price will I let them go,” he says. Elordi, evidently, met it.
Even so, parting with his inaugural purchase was not straightforward. “I tried to steer him towards a different watch,” Raksha admits. “But he was adamant – and very charming. I was easily convinced.” In the end, it brought tremendous attention to the model.
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Raksha’s fascination with the Audemars Piguet Bamboo line began pragmatically. “They’re made of gold,” he explains. “Back [when I bought them], they were trading close to melt value. I thought, worst-case scenario, I could melt them down and recover what I paid.” Beyond that, it’s their eccentricity that appeals. “There are about two dozen variations, which makes them fun to collect. They are sort of outrageous – with diamonds, gems, and sapphires set under the glass. But they don’t make a big announcement like the Royal Oak or the Patek Philippe Nautilus.”
His own story begins in Toronto, where he grew up drawing and painting before enrolling in a traditional jewelry program. Two and a half years into the three-year course, he left to pursue a personal business that was already gathering momentum. Within months, he was working with major artists.
One of his earliest high-profile commissions was gold teeth for A$AP Rocky. At the outset of his career, Raksha became known for ornate grillz – technically exacting pieces that prioritized comfort as much as spectacle. “Fitment was an issue back then,” he says. “But [our teeth] had a reputation for being comfortable.” He went on to craft grillz for Post Malone, which were worn in his White Iverson music video.
Yet Raksha was determined not to be confined to one niche. “I wanted to be recognized for more than just teeth,” he says. Time spent in Los Angeles placed him backstage at concerts and at late-night gatherings where rubbing shoulders with A-listers was common. It was there, within elite circles, that he began to promote. “I wasn’t concerned if it was appropriate or not,” he says of approaching artists about his work.
From that networking came commissions for singer Daniel Caesar – a pair of custom glasses – and a gold toothpick for rapper G-Eazy. For 1800 Tequila, Raksha undertook an altogether more experimental project: laboratory-grown diamonds created using carbon derived from the agave plant, compressed, and crystalized into stones for brooches worn by Janelle Monáe at the Met Gala. To his knowledge, creating lab-grown diamonds “had never been done from tequila.”
Other commissions are no less considered. When a client sought a piece for his infant daughter, June – a name associated with the Roman goddess Juno – Raksha resisted the obvious solution of spelling her name in diamonds. Instead, he sourced a mythological drawing of Juno with her peacock and translated it into an 18-carat rose gold pendant. “It meets his objective,” he says, “but it’s more romantic. One day she’ll inherit it.”
Among his own favorite creations is a 19-carat diamond ring for J Balvin, set using the invisible technique – stones cut and slotted so precisely that the setting disappears entirely. “There’s nothing else like it,” Raksha says, before admitting that the ring’s fineness causes him anxiety. “We’re always in the repair shop.”
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Then there is the MRO2, a piece Raksha describes as the most technically ambitious that he has produced. Constructed from sapphire crystal – a material more commonly associated with high watchmaking – it nods to the engineering feats of Richard Mille. “It’s the closest thing we’ve made to the complexity of a watch,” he says. “That’s the direction I want to take our highest offerings.”
