“There’s nothing like the Scandinavian blueness—the blue sky, the blue sea—and I can see it in my pieces,” says jewelry designer Sophie Bille Brahe. Her Copenhagen atelier is grounded in the painstaking craft of goldsmithing, yet her collections float free of convention and frequently look to the heavens: earrings based upon elliptic orbits and constellations, suspensions of iridescent pearl moons, coiled rings that glimmer with discreet diamonds. An eye for stars runs in her family—she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), and the owl-shaped fob on his pocket watch, a family heirloom, inspired one of her first pieces.

Bille Brahe’s famous ancestor was also an astrologer and alchemist, and there is an air of enchantment about her and her wearable creations. She fondly recalls childhood evening strolls with her father, a doctor, on which she was encouraged to say goodnight to all of the flora and fauna in their backyard garden. On Sundays, she and her brother were allowed to choose a drawer in the family’s “Chinese cabinet,” a fragile repository of trinkets accumulated over generations, and comb through its contents. “Once I found a precious diamond ring in the cabinet, and I got to keep it,” she says. “It made me understand the value of jewelry, and why people get so attached to beautiful objects.”

When I use gold or diamonds, my feeling is that you’re taking these precious materials out of the earth. You have a responsibility to do something special with them.Sophie Bille Brahe

What makes jewelry interesting is when it’s attached to a story or to a feeling that you get when you see it. The pieces I design have to have a story—some kind of history or poetry.Sophie Bille Brahe

Bille Brahe’s path to making beautiful objects also began at a young age. Dyslexic, she gravitated to working with her hands, and soon set her sights on goldsmithing, determined to learn the craft before delving into design. “There is this whole beautiful tradition of training goldsmiths,” she says, finally summarizing her four-and-half-year education in three words: “measurement, measurement, measurement.” Rather than go on to complete an apprenticeship, she enrolled in a master’s program at London’s Royal College of Art. “It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever done,” says Bille Brahe. “It pushed me to believe in myself, to do things that I felt like doing, and to break all of the rules I had spent years learning.”

A fateful meeting with Julie Gilhart, then fashion director of Barneys, pushed Bille Brahe to start her own company. “Julie told me, ‘You have a talent. You have an obligation to do something with it,’” she explains of the meeting in Copenhagen that led her to begin assembling the funding and tight-knit “SBB” team. Since the collection debuted in 2011, Bille Brahe’s jewelry has been worn by the likes of Madonna and Uma Thurman, but her approach remains highly personal. “I make pieces that I want to wear myself,” she says with a shrug. “My dream is to make jewelry to keep. If a woman passes down a piece of mine to her daughter, then I’ll know I did my work well.”