Claude Meylan

Claude Meylan traces its name to the Meylan family, described by the maison itself as one of the four historic founding families of haute horlogerie: in the mid-18th century, Samuel Olivier Meylan and Abraham-Samuel Meylan trained in the watchmaking arts at Rolle and Fleurier before returning to the Vallée de Joux, where Samuel-Olivier Meylan began designing and building pocket watches fitted with movements and music discs. That early passion for mechanisms became a family tradition carried forward into the present-day maison, which markets itself directly as 'Claude Meylan, sculptor of time,' still based in L'Abbaye, a Vallée de Joux village whose own history predates the watchmaking by centuries — it takes its name from an abbey founded there between 1126 and 1134 by the Premonstratensian order.

The house works almost exclusively in skeletonisation, pushing what it calls 'L'Art du Squelette' toward new territory: rather than simply removing material from a stock movement, every bridge, wheel, and element of the going train is individually 'undressed' and decorated, aiming for new forms and harmonies rather than just visibility. Its current collections are named directly after the geography surrounding the manufacture, in the canton of Vaud's Vallée de Joux — Lac, Lionne, and L'Abbaye among them — anchoring the brand explicitly in its home valley, alongside local landmarks like the Pointe de Sable beach.

The Lac line draws on Lake Joux itself, pairing steel cases and skeletonised movements with leather straps; the Tortue line centres on the Tortue Lady, a deliberately feminine, tonneau-cased skeleton watch that has drawn attention from both the public and the trade since launch; and the Montre de Poches line returns to the brand's origins, offering three pocket-watch models across three versions each, their skeletonised movements left openly visible in the tradition of Samuel-Olivier Meylan's earliest work.

The Lionne collection carries two explanations for its name depending on the source: the brand's own current materials describe it as symbolising 'the power and grace of the feline whose name it bears,' while earlier press coverage attributes it instead to a small river that rises in L'Abbaye. Either way, the line pairs round cases with elongated, teardrop-shaped lugs. Its Dentelles ('Lace') pieces set hand-skeletonised, pastel-toned movements in pink, lilac, or royal blue against a 'Marie-Antoinette grey' or white flange, in a 35mm, 7mm-thick steel case on the hand-wound Peseux 7001 (42 hours of reserve, 21,600vph), priced from roughly 2,600 to 3,900 Swiss francs depending on execution. The Scheherazade references go further, their gold-plated dials hand-skeletonised into an arabesque motif inspired by a trip designer Philippe Belais took to Dubai, offered with either the automatic ETA 2892 at 4,600 francs or the hand-wound Peseux at 2,690 francs.