Atelier Pieters

Atelier Pieters was founded by the husband-and-wife watchmaking team of Maarten and Jessica Pieters, who bring more than fifty years of combined experience to the project. Maarten, Dutch by birth, moved to Switzerland in the mid-1990s, where he worked on prototyping at THA — the complications workshop co-founded by François-Paul Journe, Denis Flageollet, and Vianney Halter — and at Janvier SA, contributed to the modern production of the Breguet Sympathique, and later led the complications department at Omega, where he worked on developing and chronometer-certifying the Omega Central Tourbillon, before spending fifteen years as Director of WOSTEP. Jessica, originally from Australia, graduated from WOSTEP herself and went on to become an instructor and Manager of the WOSTEP Worldwide Partnership, specialising in finishing and decoration. After years spent training generations of other watchmakers, the couple founded Atelier Pieters to pursue their own creative work together.

The atelier occupies the Chalet des Gollières in Les Hauts-Geneveys, in the foothills of the Neuchâtel Jura — a building originally constructed by the Association des Sociétés des Neuchâtelois hors Canton for expatriate Neuchâtelois wishing to preserve their bond with their home canton. The first two floors now house a modest machining workshop equipped only with manually operated conventional machines, an intimate finishing and assembly space, and an office, while the remaining floors form the couple's family home — 'it is hard to tell whether our atelier is in our home or our home is in our atelier,' as they put it. Two dogs, a Bernese mountain dog named Bélla and a Cavalier King Charles spaniel named Arley, serve as the workshop's self-described 24/7 security guards.

Output is deliberately limited to around four watches a year, and every timepiece comes with a lifetime service commitment. The majority of movement components are made and finished by hand in the atelier, and the German silver mainplates and bridges are left unplated so the material ages naturally over time. The Pieters describe fine independent watchmaking as inherently collaborative rather than a claim of sole authorship: while they manufacture most of the movement themselves, they entrust certain specialised parts to a small number of outside partners, in keeping with a tradition of shared savoir-faire that has defined Swiss watchmaking since the 17th century.

The debut Atelier 1, subtitled the Founders' Series, is a manual-wind tourbillon with a dual-display planetary power reserve, offered in two colourways — Minuit, in cool anthracite with turtle-dove accents, and Jour, in a warm rose-gold hue with blue accents — each limited to eight numbered pieces, sixteen watches in total. The tourbillon cage itself carries an engraved '8,' marking the size of each limited series. It is cased in solid 950 platinum at 43.5mm across and 13mm thick, roughly 86 grams of metal in a polished three-piece construction, with a domed front sapphire crystal and a planar exhibition back, both internally treated against reflection, a platinum crown bearing the Atelier Pieters logo, and 3 ATM of water resistance.

Inside is the in-house Calibre T2-03RM, a 36.6mm hand-wound movement beating at 3Hz with 35 jewels, five gold chatons, and 50 hours of reserve, displaying central hours and minutes, sub-seconds at six o'clock, and dual power-reserve indications — an arched gauge on the movement side and a discreet aperture at three o'clock on the dial. Its one-minute tourbillon runs on an antimagnetic Nickel-Phosphorous pallet fork and escape wheel, regulated by a free-sprung, variable-inertia balance with a Breguet overcoil and eight regulating screws; every mainplate is individually engraved with its calibre and series number, and the bridges carry a relief-engraved Atelier Pieters logo, finished throughout with grainage, black polishing, anglage, satining, perlage, and colimaçonnage. Milled, diamond-faceted, rhodium-plated hands, a hand-stitched ostrich-leather strap, and a platinum pin buckle complete the piece, priced at 148,500 Swiss francs excluding VAT, with first deliveries expected in November 2026 at a pace of roughly one watch every three months thereafter.