Contrary to popular belief, Baselworld is not just a steady stream of tourbillons, chronographs, and watches that are mostly black. The show does play host to some individualists who create watches that are outside the mainstream. Some are newcomers, and some return year after year, reliably delighting us with their unique vision. We take a look at a few of their creations.
One of our favorite newcomers this year is Breva. The brand’s watch is the Génie 01, a stylish and original mechanical mini-weather station for the wrist.
Breva was founded by a young entrepreneur named Vincent Dupontreué. Born near Paris in 1977, at age 11 he was selling bracelets at the beach, and at 13, skateboard ramps. At 22, he launched an eponymous fashion brand which he sold seven years later. After he earned an MBA in Switzerland and ran an art gallery, his desire to own a unique timepiece, and his inability to find just the right one, led him to launch his own watch brand. The brand’s name was inspired by a beautiful weekend he once spent on Lake Como in northern Italy. “La Breva” is a warm wind that contributes to the lake’s agreeable micro-climate. The weekend at the lake also inspired the idea for a mechanical watch that could forecast the weather. Dupontreué did his homework and found the watchmaker Jean-François Mojon and the company he started, Chronode, both familiar to fans of creative horology. Dupontreué designed the overall look of the watch, and Mojon the movement. Three years of R&D led to the Génie 01, which manages to look like something from the past and something from the future at the same time. Breva claims that it is the world’s first watch with mechanical time, altimeter, and barometer, plus a power-reserve display.
The open, transparent design serves up layers of displays, and though there’s a lot going on, the watch is easy to read. Hours and minutes are displayed on a tinted, semi-transparent subdial at 8 o’clock. Small seconds are positioned below 12 o’clock. The altimeter display arcs around the perimeter in the upper left quadrant of the display. Barometric pressure is indicated on a second tinted subdial at 2 o’clock, where a single hand points to icons representing forecast sunny, cloudy, and stormy conditions. There is a 65-hour power-reserve indicator at 4 o’clock. An anaerobic capsule measuring air pressure dominates the lower portion of the dial, with another identical capsule underneath it to maximize sensitivity. The crownat 9 o’clock handles winding and time setting. At 2 o’clock, a knurled exterior ring adjusts the barometric pressure scale, while an inner pusher adjusts the position of the altitude indication. At 4 o’clock, a crown with a knurled locking ring rotates 90 degrees to lock and unlock an air valve. An osmotic Teflon membrane filters out moisture.
The sapphire caseback features a circular scale engraved around the perimeter providing correlations between altitude and air pressure. The Génie 01 is a limited edition of 55 pieces in white gold priced at $155,000, and 55 pieces in 4N rose gold priced at $150,000. Breva tells us that it is not a one-trick pony. More watch projects are in the pipeline. The forecast looks good. (Click here to watch a video of the Breva Genie 01.)
Another relative newcomer, attending its second Baselworld this year, is Nord Zeitmaschine. Nord is a geographical reference to the north of Switzerland, where company founder Daniel Nebel was born and where he has been making timepieces since 1998. Zeitmaschine, of course, means “time machine.” Nebel did not take the traditional path to watchmaking. His background is machining, which is watchmaking if you consider making dials, cases, screws and crowns making watches. Within that world, his specialties include making tools and prototypes. He started studying watches in 1995. Over time, he began producing wheels, pinions, plates, bridges, and hands. He completed his first watch in 1998. Since then, he has expanded both his knowledge of watches and his workshop.
Interested in innovative time displays, in 2011 Nebel modified an ETA 2824 caliber to create a watch called the Variocurve. Nebel wanted to abandon the concept that hands have to turn on a fixed axle, which leads to the time always being displayed on a constant radius. After many experiments, he came up with an oversize minutes hand powered by two counter-rotating eccentric cams. The hand, which dominates the display, appears to grow longer and shorter as it traces two sweeping minutes-track arcs across the dial – one near the perimeter at the top of the dial, and the other just below the first. In an added twist, numbers that are not included at the ends of the minutes tracks are supplied by twin rotating disks. The hours are displayed on a rotating disk located at 8 o’clock, and the date on another disk at 4 o’clock.
This year, three weeks before Baselworld to be precise, Nebel completed a prototype for a new zeitmaschine, this one called the Quickindicator, and the concept plays a trick on your mind. Nebel claims that the watch has the world’s fastest-moving minutes hand. You might think “Hold on. If the hand goes around the dial faster, then it must make the trip in less than 60 minutes.” And you would be right. But what if the hand has to go around the dial more than once to measure 60 minutes? That’s the concept behind this watch. Nebel says that if you take a traditional minutes track that circles a typical watch dial and lay it out as a straight line, it measures about 88 mm in length. So a traditional minutes hand travels 88 mm in one hour. It’s not hard to imagine a minutes track with a more complex shape that is longer than 88 mm. Indeed, the minutes track on the Quickindicator is 204.8 mm long. The layout, which resembles two smaller overlapping circles inside a larger circle (though none of them is precisely round) means that Nebel’s minutes hand must travel 360 degrees three times, with each trip taking 20 minutes, to measure a single hour. The three 20-minutes tracks are not concentric, so, as on the Variocurve, the minutes hand does not turn on a fixed point, but wanders around the dial. The hours are displayed on a rotating disk at 9 o’clock, and the date on a disk at 3 o’clock.
The Quickindicator is available in three versions, priced at about $15,000.
