Ropes, brass, salt, stone: How this Kenyan designer is reinventing jewellery

Kenyan designer Ami Doshi Shah, with some of her eclectic jewelry pieces at her home studio. Photo: AFP

Sisal ropes, salt crystals, volcanic rocks and aged brass: award-winning Kenyan designer Ami Doshi Shah has always chosen unlikely materials to make sophisticated jewellery that redefines value in a carat-obsessed industry.

"As a child, I was always finding beauty in unusual things like stones and fossils," Shah, 44, said in an interview at her rooftop studio in Kenya's capital Nairobi, where she crafts her pieces by hand.