From Iron Curtain poverty to global diamond hunter

Julia Castelli, who grew up in communist Bulgaria, now lives the dream (Image: Humphrey Nemar)She spends her days scouring the planet for jewels, gold and platinum treasures that will satisfy her very exacting clients’ needs. Her most expensive discovery was a £150million diamond.’Things were different in communist times,’ recalls Julia, 46. ‘I travelled to Paris when I won a competition and stayed there for a month. I remember seeing bananas in the store and I was so shocked. I had never seen anything like it.’Where I was from, bananas were so expensive, they were a luxury.’My parents were creative, my dad drove a cab, they ran a coffee shop and had a shop selling light fixtures. I think that’s where I got my entrepreneurial side,’ said Julia who grew up in Radomir, a town outside of the capital Sofia.’I was inspired by Danielle Steel novels. Some people focus on the romance in them but I saw successful and independent women, and I wanted that. My world was entirely male-dominated and the only way for a woman to be successful, that I could see, was to either marry rich or have rich parents.’I wanted to get out of there and have more.’Julia, whose mother was Russian and her father Bulgarian, got started in the jewellery business by chance.Having travelled to the United States with three suitcases, $3,000 and an economics masters degree, she got a job in a jewellers on Madison Avenue in New York and fell in love with an industry that gives people what they most desire. She then built a career across retail before starting her own business in 2007.She got a diploma from the Gemological Institute of America and her company grew through word of mouth.Now based in London, Julia is a citizen of the world and travels far and wide to hunt down each piece for clients from the Far East, North America, Europe, Asia and Middle East.Her most recent sales have included a pair of $6million, 20-carat, emerald-cut diamonds that she says would have cost $8m-9m in a store in the diamond district of cities like New York and London.Gems are considered a stable investment at a time when the world’s financial ­markets are once again in turmoil.’Usually, happy people buy jewellery,’ she says. ‘And I found an environment where I felt happy too. People buy them for special occasions, although increasingly women and men are buying them for ­themselves as an act of self-love. Julia Castelli is now a diamond hunter (Image: Humphrey Nemar)’I love the joy on people’s faces when I have found exactly what they were looking for, or even something better.’I think I understand the love behind it. I am fulfilling a dream of theirs.’Julia, who lives in Wimbledon, south-west London, with her two young children, explains what drives her: ‘Coming from somewhere where everyone is struggling, it makes you aspire to more.’When you grow up in a communist country and then suddenly you get access to all this wealth that you had never seen, it is mesmerising.’I suddenly had 20 Chanel bags. This might seem excessive but my story is of a girl who wanted to have it and wasn’t allowed to, and then suddenly did.’It meant more to me than a Chanel bag. It represented freedom, independence, ­success and progress. I could decide. I could choose how I lived my life.’