Antoine Preziuso

Born in Geneva in 1957 to a father with Italian roots who built watches and jewellery as a self-taught craftsman in the basement of their building — sparking an unbreakable love for the craft — Antoine Preziuso dreamed as a boy of becoming an archaeologist or a pilot, but watchmaking won. He joined the École d'Horlogerie de Genève in 1974, graduated at the top of his class in 1978, and worked briefly at a prestigious complications workshop before establishing himself as an independent restorer in 1980, spending weekends browsing flea markets with old friend Franck Muller. His first signed piece, the Sienna, carried a dial cut from Carrara marble; in 1991 came his first true complication, a patented bezel-wound perpetual calendar minute repeater built around a flea-market movement, immediately acclaimed. He joined the AHCI and launched his brand officially in 1996, later relocating the workshop from Plan-les-Ouates to a converted farmhouse deep in the Geneva countryside, its bay windows framing the surrounding mountains.

His obsession is the tourbillon: 'Ever since watchmaking school I've been thoroughly captivated by the tourbillon. There's something mesmerising about this gravity-defying mechanism.' The milestones accumulated fast — the Opus 2 for Harry Winston; in 2002, the first watchmaker ever to construct an entire watch from meteorite (case, dial, buckle, and hands); the B-Side (2007), inverting convention so the movement itself became the dial's main event under the concept 'The Hidden Face of Time'; the Mega Tourbillon (2010), the world's largest tourbillon wristwatch, conceived as a nod to Dubai's newly completed Burj Khalifa; and finally the Tourbillon of Tourbillons — an idea born in 2004, patented in stages through 2011, and realized only after ten years of work alongside son Florian: three one-minute tourbillons mounted on a plate that itself revolves once every ten minutes, entering natural acoustic resonance and settling on a stable mean frequency that improves precision, driven by a patented central planetary triple-differential. Unveiled in 2015, it won both the Innovation and Public Prizes at that year's GPHG — a night the family still talks about, Antoine barely back in his seat with a glass of champagne backstage before being called up a second time. A later Chronometer edition, cased in 48mm steel, retails around CHF 420,000; the TTR3 Trillion Radiant (2025, $10 million, set with an 89-carat diamond) stands as its ultimate, most lavish expression.

Today the atelier is a genuine family enterprise, each member independent yet bound by one shared idea of horological creation. Florian, trained alongside his father on the Tourbillon of Tourbillons' decade-long development, now heads the production unit that turns out some 60 to 80 Antoine Preziuso watches a year, alongside consulting work for other brands; Laura designs the mechanical jewellery and complicated Haute Joaillerie pieces, later enriching the Tourbillon of Tourbillons itself with gem-set iterations; and wife May, who calls herself the family's 'synchronizer' — balancing three strong creative personalities so each can focus purely on craft — runs the business side. The brand once maintained boutiques in Geneva, Kiev, Osaka, and Dubai's Wafi City Mall, but today sells exclusively through personal collector relationships, with no retail network at all — a fitting choice for a family whose entire philosophy, as Antoine puts it, treats time itself as something to be defied, not merely told.