Audemars Piguet has created the ultimate watch lover’s experience

The Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet and the neighbouring Hôtel des Horlogers are strikingly modern odes to a centuries-old fascination.

Inside The Musee Atelier Audemars Piguet.

To visit a watch museum is to be reminded that marking time has been a fascination throughout history, one that has been shaped by shifting needs, capabilities and tastes. The Musée Atelier Audemars Piguet is an exceptional example of how to preserve and reform it.

The museum, opened in June 2020, is nestled in the absurdly bucolic village of Le Brassus in the Vallée-de-Joux, about an hour outside Geneva and where the most discernible sound is the gentle clanking of cow bells. Occupying the area the watchmaker has called home since 1875, the curved glass, steel and brass mesh pavilion was designed by noted Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, of the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). Its grass roof garden helps regulate temperature and light, and allows this striking building to blend with its verdant surrounds (and when the snow arrives it becomes a winter wonderland).

The Musee Atelier Audemars Piguet in the snow. Photo: Supplied

For Sébastian Vivas, heritage and museum director at Audemars Piguet since 2012, its design fits with how he sees the museum: as a “living” experience. Inside, visitors can see craftspeople at work in the grand complications and metiers d’art workshops. The restoration atelier is at the very top of the connecting historical building where Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet set up their workshop in 1875 (and which housed the maison’s previous museum). Here, a small team of watchmakers quietly repair remarkable timepieces from clients as well as those in the watchmaker’s heritage collection.

The watchmakers here, he says, “play a crucial role in maintaining a rare and unique expertise for the company. They transmit their know-how to the new generations by welcoming young watchmakers, sharing advice with other workshops, and also rediscovering disappeared know-how.”

In a safe are colourful boxes with handwritten labels of watch movements that Audemars Piguet has created over time. A hand-annotated book, handled with gloves, contains a written history of the watchmaker’s creations.

“Watchmaking is a living industry, connecting the past with the future,” says Vivas. “For our watchmakers, it is extremely inspiring to work in workshops surrounded by the masterpieces of their predecessors. For our visitors, it is key to be in contact with the artisans because our crafts are based on the transmission of know-how, passion, the [sharing] of ideas. This is a family-owned company, where the talents are at the heart of all our projects.”

A few steps from the museum is the Hôtel des Horlogers, a zigzag-shaped, eco-focused structure also designed by Bjarke Ingels and opened in April 2021. The interiors are chic and pared back, inspired by the region’s abundant natural beauty.

This includes the suspended light fittings that you might take for oyster shells or truffles but are indeed inverted lakes.

The stylish foyer of the Hotel des Horlogers. Photo: Supplied

Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Selfwinding with snow set diamonds.

As hotel manager André Cheminade notes, visitors to the area come for many reasons – there are the horologically obsessed, of course, but also the design nuts such as the Virginia Tech architecture design students who recently travelled to see two Bjarke Ingels buildings next to each other. They get the foodies who appreciate the hotel’s locally sourced produce, the nature junkies, the hikers and cyclists.

All of them come here, Cheminade believes, for a moment in time.

The museum’s charms are myriad, and include automatons and kinetic sculptures illustrating the way a mechanical watch works. At its centre is one of the most complicated pieces in watchmaking history, the L’Universelle, a pocket watch created in 1899 that contains some 1168 components and 19 different complications. Surrounding it are other examples of the maison’s long history of complications. This story is reshaped, too, with a temporary exhibition devoted to the mind-boggling new Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet Ultra-Complication Universelle RD#4. It took some seven years to create and is the most complicated wristwatch in the maison’s history.

Of course, there’s also an ode to the watchmaker’s emblematic timepiece the Royal Oak. Famously sketched overnight, and debuted by the great watch designer Gérald Genta in 1972 at the Basel watch fair, it was a luxury stainless steel watch at a time that was unheard of and with its distinctive design it changed the way we think about time. Plus it debuted in the midst of the quartz crisis and revived appreciation for mechanical timepieces. Genta would call it his masterpiece.

In a display devoted to the Royal Oak it’s possible to see the very first reference, the 5402ST, and the many iterations that have followed, from the one worn by the late Karl Lagerfeld to offshoots such as the burly Royal Oak Offshore, which this year celebrates its 30th anniversary.

Jacqueline Dimier, who joined Audemars Piguet as its first female watch designer in 1975, once said the Royal Oak was “a UFO of watchmaking” that “completely broke the design codes of the time”.

The creations of Jacqueline Dimier, her influence on design and taste for women, are of particular importance to Audemars Piguet. In addition to the tour we handle some of her archival designs, such as a ’70s gold watch with a tourbillon in the top left corner shooting golden rays across the dial. You’d wear it today. In pieces launched this year, such as the Royal Oak Selfwinding with snow-set diamonds (available in 37mm and 34mm) and the vibrant Code 11.59 by Audemars Piguet Selfwinding in 38mm, you can see in today’s tastes the through-line from the past.

Inside the Musee Atelier Audemars Piguet.

Sébastian Vivas says he cannot choose a favourite area of the museum, “every section is part of the complete narrative. Choosing one is a little like reading only one chapter in a novel, or one word in a chapter.”

Though he does find the Designing Time section of the museum the most exciting. He puts this down to its “richness,” that you can see how watchmakers from this tiny village (who in the beginning were farmers who started the craft as a respite from the Vallee’s impossible winters) have influenced culture and design globally.

Here you will find such things as the image of the glamorous and intrepid model-turned-war-photographer Lee Miller on the cover of Vogue in 1927, next to the first documented octagonal wristwatch (1917), and a high-jewellery watch made by Audemars Piguet and cased by the New York jeweller Oscar Heymann in 1921. As Vivas notes, “Both remind us of the pioneering role that women’s timepieces had in the rise of wristwatches.”

“Here, we tell the parallel of 147-year history of Audemars Piguet and the world, building links between the tiny village where our craftspeople have created extraordinary timepieces and the great cities where they met their public: passionate collectors, aristocrats, models, and even presidents,” he says.

Apart from celebrating Audemars Piguet, the museum also acknowledges the culture and craftsmanship of watchmaking throughout time, Vivas notes. “Audemars Piguet would not exist without the hundreds of independent workshops that have built this industry during the past 250 years,” he says. “Our duty is to pay tribute to all the watchmakers, case makers, dial makers, and so many other métiers who have contributed to the evolution of this art of time measurement.”