Style that needs no translation

Jewelry designer Colette Steckel sits on a white high-backed chair, one long tanned leg tucked beneath her, at the front of her new eponymous boutique on Melrose Place.

At 39, Steckel is no neophyte in the jewelry business. She’s been selling her high-end, one-of-a-kind pieces in Mexico for more than 14 years. Still, this boutique on a resurgent street is her first venture in the United States, and an important step in her life in Los Angeles, where she moved with her husband, Adrian, chief executive of the Azteca America channel, and their three kids, ages 7, 9 and 16. Already, Jessica Alba, Salma Hayek and other Hollywood types have been seen wearing her baubles in Us Weekly and at the Emmys.

“I wanted my boutique to look like it’s underwater,” she says, gesturing at the striated ebony cabinets that hold pieces of delicate driftwood festooned with her semiprecious and precious jewelry. The strong statements her creations make come from nature-inspired forms and her fascination with her Mexican heritage. “It’s a very mystic civilization; I kind of like that about my country. It’s like magic,” she says.

Steckel began creating jewelry as a child in Mexico. Her father used to go to Brazil for business and bring back uncut amethysts, peridot, citrine and aquamarine. When she was 8, she borrowed a pair of tweezers from her mother’s manicure kit and started plucking out pieces of the stones, which she polished with a nail file and sold to her parents’ friends. She also began selling hair accessories at school, coming home with her knee socks filled with wads of pesos.

Her father finally figured out how to harness her passion for fashion and helped her start a hair accessories business at age 13. Steckel sold it for about $250,000 nine years later and spent her proceeds on precious stones. At long last, she could become a jewelry designer.

“I love gems. I could live with my arm around huge tanzanite and no house,” she says, pointing at the brazen-hued fire opals and peridots. “I’m Latin. I take the risk. I go with color. I really believe in color. I think that it adds personality to people.”

Thousands of happy-looking jeweled flowers, inspired by memories of summers on her mother’s family property in France, adorn her Jardin collection and pop up throughout her work on skulls, long strands of necklaces and even on the surface of a huge sapphire ring. Her Renacimiento collection (Italian for “renaissance” or “rebirth”) includes rosaries that are jazzed up with colorful gems. “It’s a happy cross,” she says. Her scuba-inspired pieces include diamond-studded octopuses with curly tentacles that form an arm band.

Now, after two months in Los Angeles, Steckel says she’s beginning to sort out the differences between being a businesswoman in Mexico and America. Construction started on her boutique before she moved here, and it took more than nine months to complete because she needed so many permits. “In Mexico, either your driver knows how to do it, or he knows someone who knows how to do it, or you do it yourself,” she says. The lifestyle at home is different too. Steckel says she’s bewildered by the hang-out-in-the-kitchen style in the U.S. “Here, people come into the house and . . . open up the fridge. They would never do that in Mexico,” she says. “Here the kitchen is almost like the living room.”

She also misses her sprawling, minimalist, Imanol Legorreta-designed home in Valle de Bravo, west of Mexico City, which has a forest of trees growing in it. Instead she’s doing the old-fashioned America thing in a smaller 6,000-square-foot white clapboard home (“My house is so Cape Cod!”) in Beverly Hills.

One constant in both the Mexican and American homes, though, is a fabulous closet. “I’m a closet person,” she says with the enthusiasm of someone who has never lived in a studio apartment. “I used to hold all my meetings in my closet in Mexico, and my friends always ask me to design their closets.”

Still, she can’t resist the bold gestures and vibrant colors that belie her Mexican roots. “We’ll paint the house chocolate with very dark blue. You’ll see, it will be beautiful.” *