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.

Portuguese artist Bernardo d’Orey builds each Louis Erard Marqueterie de Paille dial by hand from rye straw, in around 12 hours of work spread over several days.

Engraver Florian Güllert gave nearly three months, around 500 hours including the design phase, to carving the titanium case of a single URWERK pocket watch.

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.

Louis Erard spent three years with Worn & Wound shaping a regulator dial of fluted sunray lines and lacquer, and it now joins the brand’s Métiers d’Art collection.

In the Chronoswiss Atelier in Lucerne, an engraver spends weeks cutting Chronos, the ancient Greek god of time, into a solid gold case, one stroke at a time.

At the Chronoswiss Atelier in Lucerne, tiny stars of gold are cut and set by hand under magnification, then sealed beneath layers of fired blue enamel for the watch’s dial.

Kanazawa artist Terumasa Ikeda saw a planetary system in the TYPE 9’s orbital display, and built a dial of urushi lacquer and mother-of-pearl around it.

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.

Three specialist workshops built the dial of Czapek’s newest Antarctique cell by cell, so that daylight passes through blue enamel to the movement beneath.

Engineers Sylvie Villa and Mark Miehlbradt of Wire Art gave old microchip-bonding machines a new purpose: wiring a watch dial in pure gold.