Antoine Tavan

Antoine Tavan 1805 is a one-man artisanal brand in Le Locle, Switzerland, that revives the name of a genuine figure from horological history. The original Antoine Tavan, born in France in 1749, moved to Geneva in 1763 to hone his craft and became one of the great escapement specialists of his era: in 1805 he created twelve different escapements for the Melly brothers, Geneva manufacturers, personally improving the design and technicality of three of them. In 1818 he won the gold medal and 800 florins in the Société des Arts of Geneva's chronometry competition — his timekeeper holding within three seconds per day despite temperature swings of 25 degrees and changes of position — and in 1824 he co-founded the 'École de Blanc' foundation, which later became Geneva's world-famous watchmaking school. Two centuries later, his vision of watchmaking as an art born of passion, technicality, and hard work is carried forward by Roger Zarzoso, a French-born watchmaker who spent more than 35 years working for major watch brands before registering Antoine Tavan 1805 in Le Locle in January 2016 and devoting himself entirely to it.

The brand's philosophy is radical artisanal directness: unique haute-horlogerie-inspired pieces that are hand-drawn, hand-cut, sculpted, and assembled by one single person in the Le Locle workshop, sold directly to the client — Zarzoso's stated goal being to restore the direct, intimate, warm relationship of trust between watchmaker and customer that industrialized watchmaking lost. His specialties are the classic Geneva-adjacent métiers d'art: grand feu enamel dials fired on copper using ancestral techniques for inalterable decoration, cloisonné enamel miniatures (motifs have included Ganesh and sailing ships), and hand-cut skeleton movements, both plain and enameled. The catalogue spans several families: the signature Jour/Nuit, a 40mm watch whose engraved twin half-arcs display day hours above and night hours below, read by a single hand tipped with a sun on one end and a moon on the other, powered by an ETA 2824-2 that Zarzoso modifies to a 24-hour indication; the Grande Lune with an oversized grand feu enamel moon; the Lever/Coucher du Soleil sunrise-sunset display; the Vagabonde wandering-time watch; pieces like Le Samouraï; and tourbillons at the top of the range.

Prices are startlingly accessible for handwork of this kind — from about CHF 1,300 for a Jour/Nuit to CHF 8,900 for an 18k rose gold grand feu enamel piece — a deliberate choice to open artisanal watchmaking to enthusiasts who could never approach the usual independent price points. A 2019 Kickstarter campaign for the Jour/Nuit raised over CHF 76,000 from 96 backers, introducing the brand to an international audience; collectors noted the watch's kinship with Svend Andersen's celebrated Jour et Nuit made for Cartier's Pasha line. Every watch leaves the rue des Jeanneret workshop hand-assembled with a five-year warranty — a quiet continuation, in the cradle of Swiss watchmaking, of a name that helped teach Geneva how to make watches.