Walk through the doors of La Fabrique du Temps with your eyes tight shut and you’ll realise which brand runs it the second you open them.
If the Cocoon chairs suspended from the double-height ceiling don’t give the game away and the distinctive style of the modular sofa doesn’t ring any bells, then the monogrammed furniture and immaculately tailored reception staff are sure to do it – because this is where Louis Vuitton makes its watches.
In a ground-floor room, you’ll find five machines made from burnished wood, old steel and warm brass, the oldest dating from 1830
From the outside, it’s just one of many modern, largely nondescript buildings on an industrial estate in the Geneva suburb of Meyrin; inside, it’s where the oldest and newest aspects of fine watchmaking come together to create technically brilliant, exquisitely finished and irresistibly covetable timekeepers.
Which is impressive, since Louis Vuitton only got properly serious about horology once the 21st century had well and truly turned.
The French maison first dabbled with time in 1910 with the Star travel alarm clock and followed it up with the Totem wristwatch designed in the 1930s by the founder’s grandson Gaston-Louis Vuitton – after which there was a half-century horological hiatus until the 1988 launch of the Monterey I travel watch, guided by Italian architect Gae Aulenti.
Wall clocks in the shape of oversized Tambour watches keep time throughout the manufacture.
Following its limited-edition run (today an original typically trades for upwards of €250,000 due to its rarity) the Monterey I was succeeded in the early 2000s by the Tambour which, with its distinctive, drum-shaped case and multiple variations, proved that there was a place for Louis Vuitton in the world of serious watches.
Samples of the 2,000-plus powders available to Louis Vuitton’s enamel artists
Its success led the maison first to partner with haute horlogerie workshop La Fabrique du Temps in 2007, and then to buy it outright in 2011 before purchasing local dial maker Léman Cadran a year later.
Key to the Fabrique du Temps acquisition were the co-founders and watchmakers who founded it: Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini agreed to stay on in order both to run it and to enable it to evolve into the renowned centre of horological excellence that it has become today.
In the early days, just 38 people worked at La Fabrique du Temps, but now there are 230 spread between the two ‘FDTLV’ buildings in Meyrin, where the operation was consolidated in 2014. It’s here The Blend discovered the oldest and the newest of watchmaking techniques operating in tandem to ensure the survival of ancient crafts and the development of new ones.
In a ground-floor room, for example, you’ll find five machines made from burnished wood, old steel and warm brass, the oldest dating from 1830 and the newest from 1935.
Unique dials are made using wafer-thin slices cut from raw meteorite
Installed at the behest of LVMH boss Bernard Arnault’s 27-year-old son Jean (Louis Vuitton’s director of watches), they are used to manually engrave components with exquisite, traditional finishes such as guilloché, Clous de Paris and perlage.
Such details help the brand’s creations to qualify for the prestigious Poinçon de Genève or Geneva Seal, a hard-won, independent mark of excellence only available to watches made within the canton.
One of the vintage engraving machines used to decorate movement parts with embellishments that modern equipment cannot replicate.
‘The finishes from CNC [computer numerical control] machining or stamping are nothing like as good as you get with this old equipment,’ explains Anasse El Abid, who sources them from collectors and spends up to three years restoring them.
He and two other ‘guillocheurs’ who work on them consult with Fabrique du Temp Louis Vuitton’s creative director Matthieu Hegi when a new design is in the pipeline, in order to determine exactly which decorations can be created using the traditional machines – which feature only two concessions to modernity: a high-powered magnifier and a vacuum pipe to suck up gold shavings for recycling.
Ancient and modern come together, too, in the case-making department, where 3D printers are used to create prototypes in a day, compared with the several weeks it takes to do the same using conventional drawings and hard metal.
Craftspeople work in lab coats specially made for the manufacture at Louis Vuitton’s Paris workshops
Once the shape is decided and the cases hewn by machine to tolerances of 10 microns, these are hand-polished and decorated or finished using state-of-the-art laser-engraving technology.
A clear emphasis throughout is on the importance of hand craftsmanship – both in terms of form and function and because anyone paying up to €4 million for a watch is likely buying it more as a work of art than an instrument with which to tell the time.
The use of 3D-printing techniques dramatically speeds up the design process and is particularly useful in the development of automaton movements.
While the ‘entry-level’ Tambour wristwatch starts at around £19,000, such seven-figure sums are reserved for Fabrique du Temp. Louis Vuitton’s jewels in the crown: the remarkable automaton pocket watches conceived by Navas and Barbasini that debuted in 2021 with the skull-adorned Carpe Diem, winner of that year’s Audacity prize at the prestigious Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.
Two years later, the pair unveiled the Tambour Opera Automata, this time inspired by the Chinese Sichuan opera’s Bian Lian, a theatrical art involving the almost imperceptibly quick-changing of facial masks bearing multiple expressions – replicated using a 426-part movement to power five animations on the hand-enamelled dial.
These highly limited pieces are rarely available to see up close (they are either commissioned by VIP collectors or quickly snapped up by them) but they remain true masterpieces of watchmaking; a showcase for the engravers of Fabrique du Temp Louis Vuitton, the enamellers who work with more than 2,000 powders of different colours, the dial makers who require 200 kilos of mother-of-pearl to create just 10 dials, and the individual master watchmakers who spend two months assembling each such automaton piece by piece from start to finish.
Multiple varieties of hardstone are individually hand-ground to varying degrees of coarseness, according to the type of enamel decoration required.
GOOD TO KNOW
As part of its drive to preserve horological excellence, Louis Vuitton is collaborating with five top independent makers over a five-year period to create very small editions of very special watches. The first was Rexhep Rexhepi, the second Kari Voutilainen and the most recent, Denis Flageolet of De Bethune. All proceeds from sales of the watches go to support the biennial Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives, which was inaugurated in 2024. The first winner was Raúl Pagès, with the second being announced earlier this year as young French duo Alexandre Hazemann and Victor Monnin