While we lived in Cambodia, we were keen to take visitors to Street 240 – a beautiful street in an area known as the French quarter. Beautiful boutique stores with the trademark French architecture of terrace shopfronts with shutters. This was a shopping precinct that was guaranteed to excite tourists, unique handmade products in foreigner sizes!

We were really taken with a jewellery store called “Waterlily” – what made this shop so interesting was its unique creations that were displayed in such an inventive way. With my love of colours, I was just drawn to how the colours were blended. Discovering each product was so exciting, pulling out each drawer I’d find something new. I of course went straight to the “Blue” dresser and pulled out drawer by drawer to discover product after product all in my favourite mix of colours – although each product had a blue base, they were all unique with different blends of stunning colour combinations. To my right was the “Aqua” drawers and to my left was “Red”.

We learnt that the designer was Christine Gauthier who had been living in Cambodia since 1996. Her workshop and retail store was opened on Street 240 in 2002. Christine’s inspiration for the colours and design of her jewellery products comes from her love for Cambodian nature and landscapes. With theme colours described as Sunset, Sea, Ricefield and Waterlily it is quite obvious where the insight comes from!

In my March visit to Cambodia, I met with Christine and we begun the process of building a relationship so that Khmer Trading could be the exclusive distributors of Waterlily jewellery in Australia. Starting with a limited collection of Christine’s “Copperwire and Button” designs we are pleased to announce that stockists will have their first look at Christine’s products as we launch Waterlily in Australia at the Life Instyle Trade Show in Melbourne from the 2^nd to 5^th of August.