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Geneva Watch Tour

The Geneva Watch Tour through the Old Town offers an entertaining journey through the realm of watchmaking.

This is just a short walk, but it takes you to the heart of the wonderful world of luxury watches. Along the way, it leads past 100-odd specialist shops as well as a dozen historic monuments, providing a fascinating insight into this traditional local industry. Highlights include the Patek Philippe Museum in the Plainpalais district, home to a priceless collection of antique watches from the 16th to 19th centuries as well as timepieces created by Patek Philippe since its foundation in 1839. The museum also houses a library dedicated to horology. www.genevawatchtour.com

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Discover Geneva

Patek Philippe Museum

A temple to watchmaking

Inaugurated in November 2001, the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva houses one of the world’s most important and prestigious horological collections.

Some 2,500 watches, automata, precious objects and portrait miniatures on enamel invite the visitor on a fabulous voyage through five centuries of Genevan, Swiss and European horological art, as well as proposing a panoramic view of Patek Philippe’s production since 1839. The museum also has a library with over 8000 publications on time and time measurement.

An extraordinary collection

The Patek Philippe Museum was born of a man’s passion for horology. That man is Philippe Stern, honorary president of the Geneva manufacture, who little by little built up one of today’s most extraordinary horological collections. In doing so, he intended to share his love of the watchmaking art, communicate the splendor of Geneva’s high-watchmaking tradition and ensure that this cultural heritage would be handed down to future generations.

More than 500 years of horological history

Rather than a museum devoted to a single brand, the Patek Philippe Museum is unique in that it offers the chance to discover five centuries of horological heritage, as well as the significance for all the decorative arts traditionally associated with watchmaking – engraving, enameling, gemsetting, guilloché work etc.

The collections are divided into two complementary sections: The Antiques Collection and the Patek Philippe Collection.

The Antiques Collection (XVIème – XIXème siècle)

A fascinating presentation of Genevese, Swiss and European watches and enamels dating from the 16th to the early 19th century, including a great number of masterpieces that have left their mark on the history of horology.

The Patek Philippe Collection (1839 - present)

An evocative showcase of watches designed and created by Patek Philippe since its foundation in 1839 up to the present day, testifying to more than 175 years of creativity in the production of pocket watches and wristwatches.

A building in the grand style

The Patek Philippe Museum finally greeted the world in a magnificent industrial building dating from 1919–1920. Acquired by Patek Philippe in 1975 to house Ateliers Réunis - a production unit making cases, bracelets and chains - the building was left vacant in 1996 when these activities moved to the new manufacturing premises in Plan-les-Ouates.

Philippe Stern decided that this was where he would present his collection. Between 1999 and 2001 the structure was fully restored, adding an additional floor.

Mr. Stern’s wife Gerdi oversaw the interior decoration, her aim being to give the rooms the warmth and intimacy of a private residence.

In November 2001, the Patek Philippe Museum collections were at last unveiled, in surroundings worthy of their technical, artistic, aesthetic, historical and scientific value.

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In Switzerland, Seeing Where the Watch Magic Happens

Witnessing the peace and the ‘passion’ during a tour of Roger Dubuis.

By Kathleen Beckett

GENEVA — Anyone who loves watches, collects watches or is simply interested in watches wants to do one thing: visit a place where watches are made and see one as it is being created.

That is not always so easy.

The “manufacture” — as the ateliers or factories are called in Switzerland, a.k.a. watch central — are as busy producing their wares as any workplace would be. Plus, in the highly competitive luxury watch market, there also is a sense of wanting to maintain privacy , of protecting the way companies do what they do.

While it is not common for a watch company to open its doors to the curious unless they are Very V.I.P. customers, some brands have created experiences such as guided tours and workshops that allow the public to have a look. But they are not a Disneyland for watch fans, and some require a long drive from a major city.

For example, Zenith offers reservation-only tours once a week in Le Locle, in the Jura Mountains, about 150 kilometers, or 93 miles, northeast of Geneva. In the Vallée de Joux, near the border with France, Jaeger-LeCoultre offers workshops at its Atelier d’Antoine at its headquarters in Le Sentier, as does Audemars Piguet in its Musée Atelier in Le Brassus. Vacheron Constantin and F.P. Journe also allow visits to their more Geneva-centric operations, but only to people they consider the most ardent, and acquisitive, of clients.

Another brand — Roger Dubuis, known for its high-end watches, often skeletonized and often in collaboration with luxury car brands — recently opened its doors in Meyrin, on the outskirts of Geneva, to a journalist and a photographer who were greeted by what it calls its “manufacture ambassador,” Francesca Stellino.

Her job is to welcome visitors who have been recommended by a watch boutique (she conducts tours in English, French and Italian) and show them how Roger Dubuis does what it does.

She began the tour in a hallway, in front of a poster with the company’s star-shaped logo, and talked about how the watchmaker Roger Dubuis started the brand in 1995 and championed collaborations with Pirelli tires and Lamborghini cars.

She explained that she was starting the tour there because, she warned, once we passed through a set of heavy doors onto the factory floor we might have trouble hearing her. And she was right.

The doors opened to a floor filled with dozens of big metal machines making a racket. They were being used to create components, as many as 360, that go into making a Roger Dubuis watch. Considering that the brand says it produces as many as 3,000 watches a year, that is a lot of pressing, cutting, milling, filing and polishing.At points throughout the process, parts were washed in what Ms. Stellino called, no surprise, the “washing room.” What went on inside resembled the action behind a fast-food counter, with components dropped into wire baskets and dipped into liquids, like baskets of French fries being lowered into oil.

Next step was in the “rodage et tribofinition” room, where parts were polished using a luxurious exfoliant — soap with diamond powder. Back on the main factory floor, we passed a storage cabinet that looked like a floor-to-ceiling wine rack filled with hundreds of metal rods of various widths. They were destined to be turned into pieces like “pinions, screws and wheels,” Ms. Stellino said. The three-meter-long (10-foot) metal cylinder that forms those is called the décolletage. Once the rods are cut, some of the round discs that result are run through a different machine that creates tiny teeth around their circumference that will eventually engage a watch’s gears.

Ms. Stellino stopped in front of a machine so old that some of the orange paint covering its surface had chipped away. “It’s the mother of micromechanics,” she said, used to cut “some of the crazy components of Roger Dubuis watches, like the hammers that produce the sound of the minute repeater.”

Once the pieces are produced, they head to other, quieter workrooms, and into the hands of artisans, male and female, young and mature. More polishing is in order, even on the tiniest of pieces, and it is done in one of several ways, using pastes or the most refined of sandpapers. Polishers require a “minimum of 10 years’ experience,” Ms. Stellino explained. “They work with their eyes and their ears,” listening for the particular sound that tells them that the polishing is right.

One of the workers is the company’s expert in polishing tourbillon cages until they shine like a black mirror, the “poli noir” or the black polish finish that, Ms. Stellino said, “was Mr. Dubuis’ favorite.”

Cameras zeroed in on some of the work the artisans were doing and magnified it on screens around the workrooms so visitors could see exactly what was being done.Next, we headed to the floor where the parts are assembled and turned into watches, and also where clients’ watches with complications are serviced. But first we put on white lab coats and covered our shoes with blue plastic bootees that looked like shower caps, the better to keep us from tracking in dirt and dust. Once again, we opened a set of heavy doors, but this time it was to a sanctuary of quiet concentration.

Here, dozens of watchmakers, many wearing magnifying glasses or goggles, were seated at desks and overseeing aspects of assembling timepieces. The work is so detailed, so precise, so exacting, that one watchmaker, putting together a minute repeater, equated it to being “like open-heart surgery.”

A watch in the making here undergoes quality-control checks all along its way into the world. Once all it needs is a strap and buckle, it goes into a machine labeled “Cyclo 5” that has wheels to test it for an entire week in all the positions a human wrist might make. If, at the end, the watch’s time is off by less than a minute, it gets the valued Poinçon de Genève or Geneva seal .

“A watch is a piece of art,” Ms. Stellino said as the tour concluded, and like a piece of art, the latest models were on display under bell jars placed on pedestals. Some models had yet to be revealed publicly, and provided an additional insider’s view into the world of watches.

Nicola Andreatta, chief executive of Roger Dubuis, said the visits are “a big part of our client experience.

“When people come and see what we do, their perception changes,” he continued. “It adds value.”

Normally, visitors would have to arrange a tour through their local Dubuis dealer or watch boutique. The brand said it has been welcoming hundreds of people each year, including collectors and members of various clubs, and projected that the tally will reach 200 this year.

After spending on average of 1 hour 15 minutes seeing all the watchmakers, all the machines, all the tools, the expertise and the “passion” that goes into making their watches, people understand why they cost tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of dollars, Mr. Andreatta said.

They may never look at the watch on their wrist in quite the same way again.

GENEVA WATCH DAYS

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Geneva Watch Tour: visit Geneva and discover watchmaking

Intrinsically linked to watchmaking since the world’s first watchmakers’ corporation was born in 1601 under the name “Maîtrise des horlogers de Genève”, Geneva has become home to the greatest concentration on the planet of mono-brand and multi-brand boutiques per square kilometer, quite apart from the cultural institutions that give visibility to the art of measuring time. A pedestrian route now provides an opportunity to admire them all by visiting the most iconic areas in the city, following in the footsteps of Swiss watchmaking history.

By including some 50 mono-brand boutiques and as many multi-brand retailers, the Watch Tour provides an overview of the Swiss watchmaking panorama, while visiting Geneva’s most symbolic districts – such as the station and the tourist office for a start, followed by the shopping quarter in the center, the old town with its art and decoration galleries, the banking and cultural institution district, as well as the modern art district which is home to the Patek Philippe Museum.

GENEVA’S WATCHMAKING DNA

Mur des Réformateurs (Reformers’ Wall)

Everything started in the mid-16th century, when the head of the reformation, Jean Calvin, promulgated an interdict on showing outward signs of wealth in Geneva, forcing the jewelers and goldsmiths to direct their skill towards watchmaking creation. Two centuries later, Geneva was exporting around 60,000 watches, and because there were too many watchmakers in the city at the end of the lake, they moved to the Ju ra.In 1909, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Calvin’s birth, which coincided with the 350th anniversary of the foundation of the Geneva Academy, the authorities erected the five-meter high Mur des Réformateurs (Reformers’ Wall) in the Parc des Bastions, opposite the Grand Théâtre . Statues of the movement’s four great figures stand against part of the old wall that surrounded the city up until the 19th century.

Even Geneva’s emblem par excellence, the Jet d’eau , has its origins in the city’s watchmaking foundations. Geneva’s watchmaking vocation, combined with the organization of labor division (known as établissage, attributed to goldsmith Daniel JeanRichard) from the 18th century onward, led some 4,000 watchmaking craftsmen to settle around the Rhône in order to use the available hydraulic energy, notably that emanating from the Bâtiment de la Machine as of 1872, and that of the Coulouvrenière waterworks from 1886. This pressurized water enabled a large number of operations involved in the manufacture of movements and watch cases, such as milling, to be mechanized. In their “cabinets” or workshops, the men who became known as the “cabinotiers” (master watchmakers) closed the indispensable water tap at virtually the same moment at the end of their day’s work, giving rise to over-pressure which the machinists in the Coulouvrenière then had to urgently compensate by stopping the pumps. One of them had the bright idea of installing a safety valve allowing the over-pressurized water to escape skywards up to about 30 meters high. This became such a ritual display for riverside inhabitants that the Jet d’eau was eventually moved and established as an institutionalized tourist attraction in 1891 by Geneva’s town council.

NOT-TO-BE-MISSED

Open to the public and for guided tours on request, Geneva’s biggest watchmaking museum is none other than the Patek Philippe Museum , whose four floors exhibit important watchmaking and enamel collections from Geneva, Switzerland and Europe, from the 16th to the 20th century.

An earlier part of the Geneva Watch Tour features two clocks that are radically different but equally spectacular. The Horloge Fleurie (Flower Clock) in the Jardin Anglais (English Garden) , the most photographed monument in Geneva after its Jet d’eau, consists of 6,500 flowers divided into eight concentric circles that change with the seasons and has the longest seconds hand in the world at 2.50 meters. The Passage Malbuisson clock , between the Rue du Rhône and the Rue de la Confédération, provides a musical show for passers-by every hour. Designed by Edward Wirth, its 16 bell chimes emit a melody inspired by a song from the Escalade (a big popular Geneva festival commemorating the defence of the city in 1602 in the face of an attack by soldiers from Savoy).

On the genevawatchtour.com website, you can also visit the recommended boutiques and locate the retailers of all the watch brands present in Geneva.

Brice Lechevalier

Brice Lechevalier is editor-in-chief of GMT and Skippers, which he co-founded in 2000 and 2001 respectively. He has also been CEO of WorldTempus since it joined the GMT Publishing stable, of which he is director and joint shareholder. In 2012 he created the Geneva Watch Tour, and he has been an advisor to the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève since 2011. Also closely involved in sailing, he has published the magazine of the Société Nautique de Genève since 2003, and was one of the founders of the SUI Sailing Awards in 2009 and the Concours d’Elégance for motor boats at the Cannes Yachting Festival in 2015.

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TIME TRAVEL

Eight must-visit watch museums in switzerland.

There are, of course, many reasons to visit Switzerland, but if you are into watches, a Swiss trip should feel a bit like Heaven on Earth (for you, that is; perhaps not for your fellow travelers who don’t share your passion equally). Along with the many great watch shopping (and window shopping) opportunities, Switzerland is also, as you would expect, home to many great watch museums. Unfortunately, some of the most fascinating collections are “by appointment only” and therefore require a bit of planning ahead (as with the museums of Longines, Audemars Piguet, Jaeger-LeCoultre, etc.). In this article, we introduce you primarily to some of the most interesting Swiss watch museums that all have regular visiting hours. Here are my top eight:

MIH – The Musée international d’Horlogerie in La ChaMusée international d’Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fondsux-de-Fonds houses one of the world’s largest and diverse collections of watches and clocks. It is open six days a week from 10 AM to 5 PM (closed on Monday) and offers the perfect start to your Swiss watch museum pilgrimage:  www.mih.ch

Musée d’Horlogerie du Locle , Château des Monts – Not far from the MIH, you’ll find a smaller museum in a breathtaking building located in Le Locle. During winter, the museum is only open in the afternoon, so make sure to check out the website first. http://www.mhl-monts.ch/

Omega Museum in Bienne – On your way back from La Chaux-de-Fonds, a stop at the Omega museum is a must. Since October 2019, the brand’s museum is housed in a striking steel, glass and Swiss timber building designed by award-winning architect Shigeru Ban. Visitors can even unleash their inner Olympian on a 9m running track (make sure you visit the Swatch museum in the same building as well) and discover almost everything that is related to the brand. Plus, admission is free and it is even open on Saturdays and Sundays. http://www.omegamuseum.com/

Neues Museum in Bienne – While in Bienne, check out the incredible (and quite often overlooked) collection of the Neues Museum – this is a close as you can get to visiting a Rolex museum. And there is a lot to learn about the city’s watchmaking past.  http://www.nmbiel.ch

Espace Horloger in Le Sentier – offering a modern approach to everything related to watchmaking, the Espace Horloger is located in the Vallée de Joux and open from Tuesday through Sunday (only in the afternoons). http://www.espacehorloger.ch/

Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva: Even though you are, unfortunately, not allowed to take pictures here, we still encourage you not to leave Switzerland before seeing this unforgettable collection. http://www.patekmuseum.com/

Beyer Clock and Watch Museum in Zurich (currently closed): Since you’ll most likely end up in Zurich earlier or later, make sure to visit Beyer’s small but exquisite collection in the basement of its retail store (it’s often described as the world’s leading private museums dedicated to horology). It is open in the afternoon only, and we recommend booking a guided tour or talking to the friendly staff: http://www.beyer-ch.com/en/museum/portrait/portrait-museum.html

IWC Museum in Schaffhausen: Only about 40 minutes from Zurich, you will find IWC’s own museum. It offers a unique collection of watches related to either the brand or the region. The museum tour is probably best combined with a tour of the manufacture (which requires a bit of planning). http://www.iwc.com/en/about/museum/

I have a picture of a watch factory in Switzerland that has Hamilton on front side of building and A. Huguenin FILS S. A. Can you tell me anything about it?

It’s my husbands 50th 2020 and he would love to visit all the museums as his knowledge is outstanding and would love too see them first hand

I am interested in the Rolex museum and Piaget museum any tips ?

On a trip to Switzerland a few years ago I was fortunate to be able to tour the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva. It was a high point point of my trip, the collection is is an inspiration to any fine watch collector. This museum should not be missed by anyone interested in fine workmanship, history, beauty or intricate design. I now need to return to Switzerland to visit the other museums on this list.

we are coming to Switzerland for a holiday in Sep. Will be arriving in Zurich, Where we can find a watch factory and a Museum,

Anand, closest are Beyer and IWC.

Can anyone recommend the best place to see a comprehensive vintage Rolex collection on display?

That would be Neues Museum in Bienne in my opinion.

These are the great places to visit. Thanks for sharing this information.

Cool article

Nice article. There is a typo for the name La Chaux-de-Fond above.

Thanks for noticing, looks like a copy paste error.

My all times favorite, Patek Philippe Museum…But of course they are all “must-visit” indeed.

We will be traveling to Switzerland Dec 17 to Dec 28. Will musems be open then?

Does Zenith have a watch tour and museum? Thanks

Is their a Zenith museum?

Thank you so much for your insight Roger. I am travelling to Switzerland from Canada this fall with my family and you have helped me narrow my choices with your insider list. I always wondered which watch museums would the Warch Time Team recommend. Keep up the great work! Love my all access subscription.

You can also book a visit to the TAG Heuer museum at your local boutiques.

Would really like to Visit The museum

Thanks a lot for the information on Watch Museums of Switzerland!

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