Pièce Unique — the watch only you could commission

The Octagon is my dream watch. Every decision in it — the eight sides, the woven silver, the honesty of the open movement — is the answer to a question I had carried for years: what would a watch look like if it were built to honour hard-won things?

But it is my answer. And for a while now, a thought has refused to leave me alone: who am I to decide that your dream watch is an octagon?

Opening the door

So today we open a door I have wanted to open since this atelier was founded: Pièce Unique — a commission where the watch is yours from the first line of the first drawing. Not a variation on the Octagon. Not our design with your colour. A watch that does not exist until you describe it, designed together and built once, from raw material, at this bench. Then the design is retired. One of one, never made again.

I want to be precise about what this is, because the word “custom” has been worn thin. The internet is full of assembled watches — a catalogue case, a stock movement, a printed dial, someone’s logo. Some of them are honest fun, and they are not what this is. A Pièce Unique is watchmaking: machining, finishing, problem-solving from zero — the same hard way the Octagon is made, pointed at a watch nobody has seen before.

Why the price works differently

The Octagon can cost what it costs because it lives in a series: the design work, the fixtures, the hundred solved problems are shared across the watches that follow. A Pièce Unique shares nothing. Every hour of design and every hour at the lathe belongs to one watch and one owner — and the price follows honestly from that, agreed in writing before anything is built.

I understand that this makes it a rare thing. It should be. One bench builds everything we make, so these commissions are accepted rarely, and one at a time.

The purpose, taken to its end

We make watches to maximize the baseline sentimental value they carry — meaning built into the object before it ever meets its owner. A Pièce Unique is that purpose taken to its logical end: an object whose every surface exists because one person dreamed it and two people agreed it was worth making the hard way.

I will say plainly what this means to me: I am genuinely honoured every time someone trusts this bench with an Octagon. That someone would trust it with their dream — a watch only they could describe — is the greatest honour this craft has to offer.

If you have carried a watch in your head, tell me about it. A sentence is enough to begin.