Stories

As a restorer, Michel Parmigiani encountered grenage, a hand-graining technique with a seventeenth-century recipe, and he has since taught it to Parmigiani Fleurier’s dial-makers.

The SP One began as three circles in a 2018 sketch by MB&F founder Maximilian Büsser, and a year after its debut it returns set with diamonds.

Gerd-Rüdiger Lang introduced the Digiteur without hands in 2005, and its jumping-hour idea now returns dressed in three soft pastels.

DANIEL ROTH revisits a dial-making technique from the 1940s, in which gold numerals are masked, coated in black and then revealed, on its time-only Extra Plat.

Martin Frei, Chief Designer and co-founder of URWERK, designs each watch to change with the angle, the light and the movement of the wrist.

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.

At Armin Strom, a classic colour goes where the brand has never taken it before: deep blue runs from the movement’s mainplate to the hands, the indexes and the strap.

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.

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.

Chronoswiss began in Munich in 1983 with master watchmaker Gerd Rüdiger Lang and now works in Lucerne, and two new stone dials connect those places.

At its Atelier Lucerne, Chronoswiss has sandblasted a hand-guilloché dial so that it diffuses light rather than reflecting it, which the brand calls a Chronoswiss first.