Bakkendorff

Bakkendorff is the atelier of Rune Hjorth Bakkendorff, an independent master watchmaker in Charlottenlund, just outside Copenhagen, on a mission to revive what he calls the DNA of Copenhagen watchmaking. His credentials are formidable: he graduated from the Danish School of Watch- and Clockmaking with the highest attainable grades, received the Silver Medal of the Copenhagen Association of Craftsmen — the highest award for newly trained journeymen — and then honed his skills in Switzerland, working in haute horlogerie manufacturing and artisanal watchmaking where traditional techniques met the newest production technology. Back home, he built a parallel reputation in the restoration and conservation of historical watches and clocks for private and institutional collections, serves as vice-alderman of the Watch- and Clockmakers Guild of Copenhagen and registrant of the Copenhagen Guild's records, and belongs to the Danish Guild of Antique-Conservation. For Rune, watchmaking is simply the perfect profession — a balance of craftsmanship, aesthetics, history, and technology — and every piece is conceptualized, constructed, and crafted by hand in his own workshop.

His creations carry Old Norse names that map his journey. The Byrja ('to begin') was the opening statement: a 25-piece series in a 42mm × 8.5mm case mixing stainless steel and bronze, with an engraved and frosted brass dial, titanium hands, an engraved caseback, and a new-old-stock Peseux 7001 — a hand-wound classic of watchmaking history — beating inside; a 38mm Byrja 38 followed. The masterwork is the Ætt ('family, lineage, generation'): an homage to his predecessors born directly from his conservation work. Restoring Danish pocket watches of the 1800s, Rune recognized a distinct local school — continental in outline but full of Copenhagen idiosyncrasies, technical and aesthetic — that died out when cheap Swiss and French ébauches ended creative watchmaking in the city. The Ætt resurrects it: its extraordinary time display, based on revolving zirconium-oxide dials, replicates a 1919 tower-clock mechanism by the legendary Danish clockmaker and astromechanic Jens Olsen (creator of the celebrated World Clock in Copenhagen City Hall), which mirrored the tower's main display inside the building so the clockmaker could set the time without stepping outside — Rune's first thought on seeing it was 'this would make a great wristwatch.' The handmade in-house caliber, developed and produced in his workshop with wheel train and escapement drawn from the historical AS 1130, is manually wound with a 40-hour reserve, 19 jewels and 3 micro precision ball bearings, crafted in German silver, brass, steel, and titanium, inside a 39mm steel-and-bronze case — limited to just 10 pieces.

Bakkendorff's horological art extends beyond the wrist. Moonwork, created with the Danish design duo Ahm&Lund, is a tall freestanding clock that measures time not in hours but in the 29.5-day lunar cycle: a hand-shaped sterling silver dome covering a 250-lumen LED casts a wandering shadow across a white parian half-sphere — a real-time model of the moon's phase, accurate to 57 seconds per synodic period. Its month-going movement is a tour de force of 337 parts — hard brass plates and wheels, lantern pinions with hardened steel rods, a constant-force spring with stop-work, a Graham escapement, a carbon-fiber pendulum with solid brass bob, and just four lubrication points — on a base of black basalt. Conceived as the first in a series of gallery-bound horological art pieces, it embodies the project's philosophy: to remind a stressed modern world that there are older, larger rhythms to live by. Small series, unique pieces, and museum-grade restoration — from a single bench, Denmark's watchmaking lineage lives on.