The kiln took eight dials this week and gave back one. It is the correct one.
Independent watchmaking · Le Brassus · Est. 2019
ÉCLAT
No. 19
A hand-finished mechanical calibre.
Nineteen examples a year.
Scroll — the calibre runs
Calibre É.19-1 · Manual wind
The calibre
does not flatter.
-
I
28,800 vph
A 4 Hz free-sprung balance with gold mean-time screws, adjusted in six positions to within two seconds a day.
-
II
72 hours
Power reserve from a single barrel, wound by hand. The click spring is one piece of steel, bent cold, never annealed.
-
III
176 parts · 31 jewels
German-silver mainplate, circular-grained. Every bridge carries 0.4 mm of hand-pulled anglage, black-polished to a single reflection.
-
IV
1 watchmaker
One pair of hands assembles, regulates and signs each movement. Assembly alone takes three weeks. Twice — it is built, taken apart, built again.
Case · Dial · Hands
Grade 5 titanium.
38.5 mm × 8.9 mm
Microbead-blasted flanks against hand-polished bevels. The case sits at 4.2 g — you feel the movement, not the metal.
Grand feu enamel.
Fired six times · 830 °C
Ground glass fused onto a silver blank until the black holds depth. Two dials in ten survive the kiln. We keep none of the failures.
Champagne gold.
Dauphine · ground & lapped
Solid-gold hands faceted by hand on a tin lap. The seconds hand is steel, flame-blued at 290 °C — the colour judged by eye, not thermometer.
The edition
19
Nineteen pieces each year. No boutiques. No waitlist theatre.
Each caseback is engraved by hand, No. 01∕19 through No. 19∕19.
2026 edition — six pieces remain unallocated.
Atelier notes
From the bench,
unedited.
Rejected a batch of balance springs. 0.3 seconds a day fast in the vertical positions is 0.3 too many.
Piece 14∕19 leaves for Kyoto tomorrow. The bench feels lighter than it should.
Allocation · 2027
Nineteen letters
will be answered.
Allocation opens each January. Write to us — who you are,
what you wear, why this one. We read everything ourselves.
allocation@eclat19.ch