Vianney Halter started his training young and finished early too. “I began to learn the watchmaking basics when I attended a watchmaking school in Paris, and I was just 14 at the time,” the watchmaker recalls. “But I turned out to be quite a good student. I ended up completing the programme ahead of schedule, and even persuaded one of the professors to teach me some aspects of watchmaking that weren’t in the programme.”

 

Urwerk UR102 design sketch technical drawing for A Collected Man London

An early sketch of an Urwerk UR102, courtesy of Urwerk.

 

That was just the start of his education. On graduation, he got a job at a clock restorers in Paris, then a year later moved across the city to work with a pocket watch maker. Three years later, he set up his own workshop, specialising in desk clocks, before finally moving to Switzerland to work with François-Paul Journe at THA “and to learn the Swiss watchmaking mentality, from repair to creation”. So, when he came to make his first complete timepiece, his first solo effort, he went for it. There was careful planning. He cut all the components out in cardboard at ten times scale and set them all out on to a wooden board - “that was my way of making sense of it all, not on a computer,” he says. Then came the careful making.

The result was a pocket watch commissioned by Audemars Piguet. “It had a minute repeater, grande sonnerie, power reserve indication, sunset indication and moon phase. The whole thing was my own conception too,” says Halter, casually. His first wristwatch, later on? No less than a musical piece with automaton for Jaquet Droz, “but I don’t remember much about that one,” he adds.