Time is Money

General

Handmade Swiss watches definitely don’t come cheap. But take a good look at how these things are put together and you’ll see why they’re worth every franc, says James Gurney

OF ALL THE things money can buy, it seems that watches have the most power to raise the ire of the public eye and excite the censorious opprobrium of the socially democratic columnists.

‘To spend £200,000 on a wristwatch is a defiant spit in the face of those whose lives would be transformed by such a sum,’ wrote Polly Toynbee in her 2008 book Unjust Rewards. Would a modest villa in Tuscany (3-4 times that price), a car, a pair of guns or even a very minor Degas excite such a cloud of righteous invective?

At first I was more interested in the number she chose as excessive but believable. Even five years earlier, £200,000 would have been dismissed as a fantasy price, whereas now it represents the limit of all but the most extreme watches, setting aside jewellery watches for the time being. Nevertheless, Toynbee’s statement got under my skin. What of wider value could come of so expensive a watch? The obvious answer is in the fabulous amounts of highly skilled labour such watches absorb in their manufacture, but as fine as the idea of preserving such crafts is, £200,000 is surely overkill. There has to be something more.

That something can be found most clearly in a recently restored and extended farmhouse just outside the not overly prepossessing town of la Chaux-de Fonds in the Swiss Jura. It is here that Greubel Forsey has consolidated a watch-making business that was occupying a confusing array of temporary spaces in the town into a state-of-the-art ‘manufacture’. If, from the outside, the extension looks as if it has crashed inadvertently into the farmhouse, you start to understand the point of the ultra-watch the moment you step through the farmhouse’s door.

METICULOUSLY RESTORED, PARTLY using the remains of a similar farmhouse from across the field, the original building is part reception, part canteen and social space for the 100-strong team — the ethos of Greubel Forsey has a slightly Silicon Valley feel, though I suspect few Californian companies eat quite so well. The business part of the setup is all in the new extension, with the heavy plant on the ground floors and the assembly and finishing ateliers above, getting the best of the light.

To be honest, the various multi-axis lathes and spark-erosion gear is nothing more than you would find at any serious watch manufacture. What is remarkable is how little work these machines do. Computer-controlled lathes of this sort are ferociously expensive and are expected to be worked hard and fast to pay for themselves. At a conservative estimate, the kit at Greubel Forsey is capable of producing enough components to make perhaps 15,000–20,000 movements a year, but their actual production is nearer 100. This huge disparity is part of what makes Greubel Forsey’s watches so utterly perfect and so fabulously expensive.

By having so much spare capacity, Greubel Forsey ensures that no compromise is ever required in making its watches. Its technicians have all the time in the world to set the machines up for each operation, and it is also unavoidable that preparing a run of 50 components takes the same amount of time as for a run of 5,000. It would be cheaper to contract out this work, but that would be to offend against the almost messianic pursuit of perfection that drives everything at the company.

This pursuit is to be seen in more accessible form in the atelier devoted to ‘finition’, the polishing and decorating of the 350-plus components that go into a Greubel Forsey. To work here requires a sort of steely placidity as two rules hold sway. The first is that the standard expected is perfection, the second that difficulty and time are irrelevant in the design of the watch parts. Thought is given here to levels of detail that are headache-inducing to witness: if Robert Greubel designs a tourbillon bridge to camber at a specific angle, that is what has to be achieved here. Interestingly, some of the work is parcelled out to individual craftsmen to work on at home, in an echo of the traditional working patterns that established watchmaking here.

THE FINISHED COMPONENTS are then assembled with extreme care, from start to finish by a single watchmaker — the industry norm at almost every level is for production to be modular with watchmakers concentrating a set of operations. As in the ‘finition’ atelier, time is nothing compared to the pursuit of perfection.

Making watches is only part of the story. Greubel Forsey has a large team of designers and constructors working on new projects for themselves and for other companies. This team having the advantage of a fully fledged but underused suite of production tools for their prototyping, time and cost are ruthlessly ignored in favour of excellence. As a strategy it works: client companies keep returning despite the Greubel Forsey approach to economics.

The apparently cavalier approach to cost is, paradoxically, what keeps Greubel Forsey honest — the firm has to achieve unprecedented levels of excellence to even begin to justify the prices it charges. Watches such as the recent Invention Piece 3 live up to the billing all this implies. The watch has a single tourbillon cage (recent watches have used four asynchronously) inclined at 25° to the horizontal plane which rotates in 24 seconds (‘normal’ tourbillons turn once per minute or more). The whole piece is conceived to be watched at work, the design allowing almost every moving part to be seen and appreciated — except where clear sapphire discs allow pointer hands to appear to float unlinked to the movement.

In the end, though, it isn’t this incredible inventiveness and extreme finish that is important, or the justification for spending quite so much on a watch. The purchase price, apart from conferring possession of a work of art, supports the whole edifice, a place where the truly talented get to create and produce the very best possible. Greubel Forsey, in turn, keeps a tradition fresh and full of life.

Picture: Greubel Forsey’s Invention Piece 3

BACK TO THE FUTURE
Watch design may move at an almost imperceptible pace compared to fashion’s swings from colour to colour and mood to mood, but there are trends and tendencies that pick up steam and gain a following — even if the cycle is one that lasts years rather than the months and weeks of fashion. As pre-crash high-end watches became ever more complicated, it was inevitable that the more extreme designs would cross the line into the absurd and equally inevitable that there would be a reactionary swing toward the purer lines and purposes of vintage era.

As it seems that the 1950s are where the mood is among watch brands, it will be interesting to see who interprets the trend best. One early contender is the Tonda 1950 from Parmigiani, built around the new ultra-slim movement (self-winding and just 2.6mm high) the Fleurier manufacture has been developing over the past few years.

As can be seen from the image above, it retains the distinctive organic shapes in its lugs that are Michel Parmigiani’s signature and shows that restraint does not necessarily mean dullness.