Bonniksen

Bahne Bonniksen (1859–1935) was a Danish-born horologist who moved to England in 1882 at the age of 23, settling first in London before establishing his own workshop in Coventry, which grew to employ around 25 people. He patented the Carrousel in 1892 — a rotating-cage regulator conceived as a more practical, robust rival to Breguet's tourbillon. Where a tourbillon's escape wheel meshes with a fixed fourth wheel, so that the energy driving the escapement is inseparable from the energy needed to rotate the cage itself, Bonniksen's Carrousel drives the escape wheel directly from the going train while a separate auxiliary train, typically taken from the third wheel, turns the cage independently — the relative difference between the two is what powers the escapement, an idea the modern brand's '±' logo alludes to directly. Nearly 400 Carrousel-equipped watches were tested at the Kew Observatory, and by the century's end, English makers using Bonniksen's system were placing consistently among the best results; client houses including Paul Ditisheim, Charles Frodsham, Paul-D. Nardin, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet, and A. Lange & Söhne bought Carrousel ébauches or finished mechanisms from him for exactly this purpose. He founded the British Watch & Clock Makers' Guild in 1907; the Carrousel fell out of favour after his death, its decline coinciding with the shift to wristwatches and the broader collapse of British watchmaking.

The modern house was founded in 2026 in La Chaux-de-Fonds by Maximin Chapuis and Jason Chevrolat, both still in their twenties at the time. Chapuis first encountered the Carrousel during his own studies in the Vallée de Joux, when he found that no one could properly explain how it worked; the resulting research turned up something remarkable — a final 1903 sketch by Bonniksen himself of a fully pivoted Carrousel that he never lived to build. Before proceeding, Chapuis and Chevrolat made contact with Bonniksen's own descendants out of respect, learning that no one in the family had continued the watchmaking business after his death. Chevrolat, before turning to watchmaking, was a national-level professional mountain-bike downhill racer; when that career proved unsustainable, he completed dual master's degrees simultaneously, one technical at Polytechnique Paris, the other in management and entrepreneurship, and later spent time at Christophe Claret and Bovet, also featured in this catalogue. The two met over a lunch arranged by a mutual friend that ran three or four hours, ending with Chevrolat's proposal that they build the house together.

Chapuis, a student of Michel Boulanger at the École d'Horlogerie de Paris and a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers of London, now handles the house's technical direction and teaches precision mechanics and horological history at WOSTEP; Chevrolat serves as CEO. The project is the fourth in the Time Æon Foundation's 'Naissance d'une Montre' series and the first time the Foundation has helped found an entirely new brand rather than simply produce another entry in its existing series — earlier chapters were built by Michel Boulanger himself in 2012 under the guidance of Philippe Dufour, Robert Greubel, and Stephen Forsey, then by Dominique Buser and Cyrano Devanthey in 2019, then by Ferdinand Berthoud, also in this catalogue, in 2025. Bonniksen is self-financed; the founders have said they turned down outside investment offers specifically to preserve their independence.

As of mid-2026, the watch existed only as sketches, models, and roughly 5,500 hours of research, reconstruction, and refinement — a genuinely handmade project, built without automated machinery, rather than simply hand-finished. Naissance d'une Montre 4 – Le Carrousel will be the first hand-crafted Carrousel ever built into a wristwatch under 40mm, a scale never attempted in Bonniksen's own lifetime. Its inverted, three-hand calibre brings the atypical three-quarter plate to the dial side rather than hiding it on the back, visible through two domed crystals front and back; hours and minutes sit on an offset sub-dial at 12 o'clock read by modernised English pear-shaped hands, a long central seconds hand sweeps the dial, and an offset aperture in the plate reveals the fully pivoted Carrousel completing a full rotation in just 30 seconds — far faster than the 34-to-52.5-minute rotations of Bonniksen's original mechanisms, and demanding enough that the design uses rollers to relieve the cage's pivots of radial load, plus a Maltese-cross stopwork on the barrel to keep torque delivery within a stable, consistent range. Finishing follows the English vocabulary Bonniksen himself would have recognised — screwed chatons, a mainspring barrel boss, six-spoke wheels, hand-polished chamfers, and black polish across multiple components — all carried out by hand in the house's own La Chaux-de-Fonds workshop. The debut piece, a unique steel example, is planned to go to auction, with ten further examples to follow.