Have you ever wondered what it would be like to enter a time machine and visit 17th and 18th century Swiss Vallée de Joux? For one, you'd be able to see what it was like creating watches from scratch and by hand. Using ingenious machines to assist, the local craftsmen from the famed region created some of the most desirable and innovative watches ever produced.
Well, while no machines will take us to this glorious past, one new manufacture from the region is achieving exactly the same, but perhaps better by using modern materials and techniques. Romain Gauthier and his eponymous brand is the brain and soul behind this miracle. Born and raised in the Vallée, Gauthier's watches are the perfect blend of tradition mix with modern materials and thinking.
In 2013 Gauthier's Logical One won the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève for best men's complication. Reinventing the chain-in-fusée technique using rubies to reduce friction, Gauthier produced a watch that maintains constant transmission of energy from the mainspring as it winds down. Winding the watch is done with a special pusher that blends with the case, while the mainspring plates are replaced with sapphire to reduce friction when it unwinds.
And the result is simply stunning. Not only due to the open dial showing the award winning mechanism, but due to level of finishing you can notice on every aspects of the timepiece. Indeed, Romain Gauthier believes in using the classical techniques of hand-polished bevels, snailing, straight-graining, circular-graining, hand-frosting, on every parts. The attention to details is maniacal as the finishing of some parts take weeks to complete!
So what is new for 2018 at the young manufacture. Well it is another uncompromising timepiece with similar modern twists and materials. The Insight Micro-Rotor is the brand's first automatic watch offering 80 hours of power reserve but with all the finishing of Gauthier's previous masterpieces.
Offered in either natural titanium or black titanium, the resulting timepiece is unbelievably light on the wrist. It was like trying on a Richard Mille classic watch, if they ever made one. The resulting look is decisively classical with a round 39.5 mm case but the open dial and incredible fit and finish tell us this is rather something modern with old elegance.
And Romain Gauthier is not just satisfied to create timepieces for men anymore as for the first time time they produced one for ladies. And to woo the fairer sex, Gauthier replaces the intricately finished main plates with white mother of pearl cut out dial.
Using a snow-set micro-rotor mounted on red gold finishing bridges, the new automatic movement blends perfectly with the red gold case and is finished with white alligator strap.
Limited to 20 pieces, the Romain Gauthier ladies Insight Micro-Rotor comes in two versions. The white Australian mother of pearl shown above and another 20 in red gold with black Tahitian mother of pearl.
For me, Romain Gauthier represents the future and present of fine Swiss contemporary watchmaking. By insisting on continuing the use of old traditions, yet blending in new materials and techniques, they are producing timepieces with no compromises reaching the pinnacle of old finishing with a modern twist. And if you think about it, it's really the only one logical thing to do in order to maintain the heritage and history of Gauthier's patrimony.
One of the winners in the 2019 GPHG awards in the first week of November was a two year old upstart watch brand from Kuala Lumpur named MING Watches. The young brand won best watch in the Challenge category at the Geneva show to the delight of its founder and watch aficionados who have regularly helped sell out the brand’s 11 prior releases since its debut of the 17.01 watch.
MING watches are not limited per we but are produced in small batches of a few hundreds, which in effect make them limited. A quick perusal to their web site shows that all models, except for the two new 2019 models have sold out. Interestingly the new models are also priced much higher than the previous ones. However, before getting ahead of ourselves, how does one go about seeing or trying on a MING watch?