Stories

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.

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.

Chronoswiss drew the Opus Dakar Sundown from the last golden light over the desert, pairing steel with 18ct red gold and a sand-coloured strap.

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.

AMIDA co-founder and creative director Matthieu Allègre sees the brand not as a heritage archive but as a way to pick up where AMIDA left off.

URWERK co-founders Martin Frei and Felix Baumgartner turned a science-fiction gesture into a complication, and for the last UR-120 they dress it in deep blue and gold.

Founder Maximilian Büsser wondered what would happen if a robot’s head were a watch, and product designer Maximilian Maertens spent four years shaping the answer.

At the Chronoswiss Atelier Lucerne, the dial of the new Delphis Glacier is guilloché by hand, with textures inspired by glacial ice.