Bianchet

Founded by Rodolfo and Emmanuelle Festa Bianchet — and today led as a united family alongside their three triplet sons — Bianchet is a Swiss watchmaking maison rooted in a remarkable confluence of cultural heritage. On the Italian side: the Festa family's roots in northern Italy's textile traditions, a heritage of craftsmanship and material understanding dating to Stefano Lora's wool trading business in Trivero (1888). On the French side: Emmanuelle's father, architect Jean-Louis Girodet, dedicated his career to geometry, proportion, and the relationship between structure and human scale — working on major public projects including the Gare de Lyon Part-Dieu, winning the Grand Prix de Rome, and spending years at the Villa Medici researching the Golden Ratio. From him Bianchet inherits its central design philosophy: Form Above All. The Golden Ratio (1.618) governs every design decision — from rotor and bridge geometry to case architecture and bracelet contrast — appearing in the continuous lines flowing from bezel through lugs, in curved volumes meeting sharper transitions, and in the principle of Dynamic Tension: flowing curves set deliberately against sharp edges, simplicity held against complexity. Each Bianchet timepiece is machined, bevelled, and assembled entirely within the manufacture in La Chaux-de-Fonds, where engineers and artisans work under the same roof from raw component to finished watch — the anglage of the bridges alone consuming more than thirty hours of hand-finishing per movement.

The tourbillon sits at the centre of the brand's mechanical philosophy, and until 2026 that philosophy was expressed exclusively through tonneau-shaped cases: the Tonneau UltraFino and the sportier B1.618, offered in Sport GMT and Grande Date variants. That changed just ahead of Watches and Wonders 2026, when Bianchet unveiled its first-ever round case, the Rotondo UltraFino — a deliberate act of reinvention the brand itself called brave, given how central the tonneau silhouette had become to its identity. At 39.5mm and just 8.9mm thick, the Rotondo houses a newly developed automatic flying tourbillon calibre, the UR01, derived from Bianchet's earlier movement but fully reengineered for the circular case: just 3.85mm thick and weighing under 8 grams, with a 60-hour-plus reserve, a friction-reducing winding and setting mechanism, and shock protection engineered to withstand 5,000 G — an unusually robust specification for so thin an ultra-flat tourbillon. Offered in Grade 5 titanium (75g, CHF 62,500) or high-density carbon (48g, CHF 67,500), both water-resistant to 100m, the Rotondo pairs its openworked dial with an integrated bracelet and quick-release strap system, its partially skeletonized 18k rose gold rotor providing a chromatic counterpoint to the movement's architecture.

The Rotondo line expanded quickly into precious metals: a Rose Gold execution paired satin-brushed surfaces and polished bevels against the same 5,000G-rated architecture, followed by a full 18k gold reference — case, bracelet, and rotor all in solid gold — offered against black PVD-treated titanium bridges in a contrast the brand calls, fittingly, Dynamic Tension rather than mere ornamentation. Every Bianchet timepiece, across all three collections, carries a five-year international warranty against manufacturing and mechanical defects. Barely half a decade removed from its founding, Bianchet has built its entire identity on a single, disciplined argument: that the tourbillon deserves a design language as deliberate, and as mathematically considered, as its mechanics.