Stories

Czapek designer Chloé Desbiolles proposed a dial built around the two central motifs of Boris Vian’s 1947 novel: a cocktail-composing piano and a water lily.

A friendship between Czapek’s CEO and an independent watchmaker gave the Place Vendôme Complicité its double escapement, now dressed in platinum and ice blue.

Czapek returns to the address where François Czapek founded his first Geneva company, opening a new flagship on the Quai des Bergues.

Czapek’s engineers reversed an entire escapement so that a skeletonised calibre could be read from the front, through a dial made of sapphire rather than metal.

At GT Cadrans, near Lausanne, each slice of Gibeon meteorite is acid-washed and polished by hand to reveal its Widmanstätten lines before any tint is applied.

At Donzé Cadrans, only four craftspeople apply the enamel to the rippled dial of Czapek’s Promenade Goutte de Rosée, and each dial takes up to five hours of work.

Czapek developed its Cosmic Blue for the first Antarctique Tourbillon, then chose to wait, keeping it to unite three Antarctique models in titanium.

Only two specialists at GT Cadrans can make the dial of the Promenade Midnight Pearl: blue aventurine glass laid over Tahitian mother-of-pearl, around 0.4mm thick in all.

At GT Cadrans, near Lausanne, only one artisan can brush the varnish that shapes the clouds on the Antarctique S Ice Cloud, working entirely by hand.

Czapek’s new steel chronograph borrows its dial’s deep, straight lines from the tread of a sports-car tyre, in a colour the brand calls Victory Green.

Czapek hides a Latin phrase under the white enamel of its newest Quai des Bergues, visible only when light catches the dial at a certain angle.

Xavier de Roquemaurel, CEO of Czapek, wanted to tell the time without traditional hands, and designer Thomas Funder gave the idea a flying saucer to live in.