Armand Nicolet

The Armand Nicolet story begins around 1875 in Tramelan, in the Bernese Jura, where Armand Nicolet, the son of a watchmaker, set up his own Atelier d'Horlogerie after a brilliant apprenticeship. In 1902 he produced a pocket watch with a guilloché rose-gold case, an enamel dial, a single-button chronograph, a complete calendar, and an hour, quarter, and minute repeater, and his watches are still kept in the company museum. When he died in 1939 his son Willy took over and built the firm into one of the region's most important production facilities, and in 1987 Willy's chance meeting with the Italian watch entrepreneur Rolando Braga began a cooperation between Swiss technical skill and Italian creativity.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s the Armand Nicolet atelier was one of the most specialised in what the brand calls the T1 process: decorating, assembling, and fine-tuning movements. It worked on complicated calibres such as the Venus chronographs, including the rattrapante or split-second, and the complete calendar, finishing movements that it sold to many of Switzerland's most prestigious brands. When quartz arrived at the end of the 1970s, Willy Nicolet kept the atelier open rather than closing or converting it, preserving that knowledge.

That knowledge now lives in the O.H.M. (Original Historical Movement) series, which restores and modernises old movements from makers such as Unitas, Venus, ETA, Peseux, and FHF, adding shock protection and decoration, and appears only in limited editions because few original movements remain. A ten-step process measures every historical component, rebuilds the movement in a 3D program, tunes and decorates it with original historical tools, and assembles it by hand. The L06 uses the AN501, derived from the 1951 UT-176 and restored in 2006, made in 300 pieces with 18 rubies and 125 with 17. The L15, limited to 499 pieces, runs the automatic AN0703A, from the 1967 AS 1883 modified in 2014, with 25 jewels, 21,600 vibrations per hour, Côtes de Genève, and perlage in a 39mm case. The LB6, limited to 255 pieces at CHF 4,900, runs the hand-wound AN0731B, from the 1956 FHF 264 modified in 2017, with 17 jewels and 36 hours of reserve in a 43mm case.

The contemporary collection is mostly built on Sellita bases modified to Armand Nicolet's specifications: the AN200 (SW200), AN330 (SW330 GMT), and AN500 (SW500 chronograph). The 41mm J09-3 comes as a Date (CHF 1,450–1,750), a GMT (CHF 2,250–2,550), a Chronograph & Date (CHF 3,350–3,650), and a Skeleton (CHF 2,250–2,600), all with guilloché dials. The M02 HS2 Jumping Hour, also listed as the M02-5 (CHF 2,800–3,100), is the result of more than five years of development and uses an AN1560 jumping-hour module built in the Tramelan factory, inspired by a vintage mechanism common among Tramelan makers decades ago and fitted to a modified SW200 in a 41mm case with a guilloché dial; an M02 Toni Art Special Edition has a hand-painted case. The pilot-inspired MM2 line has volcanic-sand dials with raised Arabic numerals, as a 41mm Date (CHF 1,400) and a 43mm Date (CHF 1,400) and Chronograph (CHF 2,900). The JS9-41 diver is rated to 300 metres with a ceramic bezel and a screwed crown with a rubber link, in Date and GMT versions (the GMT at CHF 2,400–2,500, the Date versions currently out of stock), including a black DLC variant. The M03-3 is a 34mm women's quartz moon phase on the Ronda 708 (CHF 900–1,000), with diamond-set versions at CHF 1,650 and CHF 4,200. Across these pages, prices run from CHF 900 to CHF 4,900.