Hautlence: The Swiss Watchmaker That Refuses To Tell Time Normally
There are watches that tell the time, there are watches that tell the time while looking rather nice, and then there is Hautlence.
If you have never come across the Swiss independent before, prepare yourself for a rather enjoyable rabbit hole. Hautlence is one of those watchmakers that seems to have looked at traditional watchmaking, politely nodded, and then decided to do almost everything differently.
Founded in Neuchâtel in 2004 by Guillaume Tetu and Renaud de Retz, Hautlence was created with a very specific ambition: to rethink how time could be displayed. Even the name gives you a clue. Hautlence is an anagram of Neuchâtel, the Swiss city where the brand was born.
Rather than simply putting another set of hands onto another round case and calling it innovation, Hautlence began experimenting with jumping hours, retrograde minutes, moving components and increasingly elaborate mechanical displays.
In other words, Hautlence decided that telling the time should be considerably more entertaining.
A Very Different Kind Of Swiss Watchmaker
Hautlence sits firmly within the world of independent Swiss watchmaking, but its approach has always been somewhat removed from traditional haute horlogerie.
The brand's early watches established the formula. Instead of relying on a conventional dial, Hautlence developed mechanical architectures in which the movement itself became part of the visual experience.
The HL calibre arrived in 2005, followed by the HLQ in 2009 and the HLC in 2010. In 2011 came the HL2.0, another significant step towards the complicated, highly visual mechanical creations that would become synonymous with the brand.
The idea was simple enough.
Why should the movement hide underneath the dial when it can actually be the star of the show?
It is a philosophy that still runs through Hautlence today.
Exclusivity Comes As Standard
One of the most interesting things about modern Hautlence is just how small the production numbers are.
The brand's current philosophy limits many of its contemporary pieces to a maximum of 28 examples. That number is not random either. The Hautlence logo incorporates the numbers two and eight within a Möbius inspired design, reflecting the brand's approach to exclusivity.
This is not a company trying to flood the market.
Hautlence is firmly operating in the world of independent watchmaking where rarity, mechanical originality and individuality are part of the proposition.
And that makes sense.
When your watch looks like nothing else on the market, making thousands of them would rather defeat the point.
Why Hautlence Matters
There is a tendency within luxury watchmaking to confuse innovation with adding another material, changing the colour of a dial or putting a new strap onto an existing case.
Hautlence takes a rather different approach. It asks a much more fundamental question. What if we changed the way the time itself was displayed?
That philosophy has remained remarkably consistent since 2004. From the early jumping hour mechanisms to the Linear, Vagabonde, Sphere, Kubera and Retrovision, the common thread is not a particular case shape or complication.
It is the refusal to accept that a watch has to look like a watch. That makes Hautlence particularly interesting in an industry where heritage is often the most valuable word in the dictionary. Hautlence has heritage, of course, but it is young enough to have the freedom to create its own.
Winding Things Up
Hautlence is one of those wonderfully eccentric independent Swiss watchmakers that reminds us why mechanical watchmaking is still capable of being exciting. It does not simply decorate traditional watchmaking. It questions the fundamentals of it.
Jumping hours, wandering displays, spherical indications, linear mechanics, television inspired complications and now the architectural Kubera all demonstrate the same underlying philosophy: there is more than one way to tell the time.
And while the big Swiss names continue to battle over fractions of a millimetre, heritage and increasingly elaborate variations on familiar designs, Hautlence is happily doing something altogether different.
Which, in our book, makes it rather difficult to ignore.
