From drawing your idea about the perfect mechanical watch to its materialization, mastering a whole diapason of skills is a must in our work. The level of creativity, rigor and precision in the execution of these different tasks is what makes up our distinctive touch.

Graphic design: Drawing an individual watch design can take up to one month and requires perfect technical knowledge of the watch movement to be skeletonized and its composition. This is equally the phase where our exchanges with customers are at their most intense, as our goal is to match our design concepts to each client’s vision as closely as possible.

Micro engineering: Based on our own technical blueprints, we manufacture bespoke watch cases as well as most of the smaller parts constituting a timepiece such as balance wheels, bridges, crowns, hands and screws.

Jewellery: Includes activities such as handmade polishing into high brilliance, grinding, galvanized coating and other surface conditioning tasks. We equally craft unique strap buckles. Last but not least, our jewellery techniques are applied in the process of skeletonizing the watch movements.

Stone-setting: Decorating the cases, strap buckles and even the movements of the timepieces with gemstones.

Engraving: Decorating various watch parts by hand, e.g. movement, dial, case, strap buckle, etc. (according to client’s wish)

Horology: Involves tasks such as disassembling a caliber and assembling it back once skeletonized; cleaning, lubricating and regulating the watch mechanism and testing for accuracy.

Our specialty - skeletonizing - consists in piercing, removing or trimming structurally non-essential material from major movement parts, namely main plate, bridges, cocks, barrel and rotor (if present). Each original watch caliber is thus transformed by our hands, resulting in a bespoke design matching our customers’ wishes, while retaining its initial quality and precision. The inner workings of our mechanical timepieces are clearly exposed for the viewer to appreciate while enjoying the see-through aesthetics through the front and/or the back sapphire glass.

Skeletonizing constitutes an incredibly delicate and intricate endeavor, especially because this procedure is inherently irreversible. Utmost care must be applied in order not to affect the ultimate functionality of the mechanical timepiece, and a fine balancing act is always required to achieve the desired design aesthetics. As the specialized journalist Mr. Bredan rightly concludes after our workshop’s visit: “It is much like tight-rope walking, where maintaining the balance between the amount of the removed and remaining material is as important as finding the best mixture of highly modified designs and basic values, such as legibility and timelessness. In essence, it is a science all to itself, a process that necessitates extremely careful planning and all the more accurate execution".

It should come as no surprise that this science or art of skeletonizing is actually a centuries-old watchmaking tradition. The father of the skeleton watch is considered to be André-Charles Caron (incidentally also the biological father of Pierre-Augustin Caron known as the writer “Beaumarchais”) who started to expose skeleton timepieces in his Parisian shop around 1760 as a way of attracting in-depth attention from the public. Hand-working on the plates, bars and bridges of the watch to reveal what lay underneath, the wheels and gears of the timekeeping were there for all to see. Since then, skeleton watches became rather rare, exceptional models or limited editions created by watchmaking brands at the occasion of various anniversaries. Nowadays, most of the skeletonized timepieces are produced to some extent with the involvement of machines too. This is not our case.

All our unique timepieces are fully skeletonized and engraved by hand, under a microscope.

We shall naturally be delighted to provide the wealth of our talents at your service, crafting the bespoke timepiece you personally envision. Kindly consult the “Contact us” section for learning more details on how to proceed.