Cornehl Stuttgart
Steffen Cornehl grew up in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, trained as a retail salesman before discovering watchmaking during a jeweller's apprenticeship, then studied at the watchmaking school in Hamburg. He won an award from the Chamber of Crafts as an apprentice and completed his master craftsman degree with honours in 2001. Since 1998 he has been based in Stuttgart.
Alongside his own watch brand, he is a member of an 'Expert Group on Historical Watches' that travels to the Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg once or twice a year to restore the palace's collection of 350+ historic Tsarist-era clocks — all volunteer work, paying their own flights — a project Cornehl has contributed to since 2002, when the group has revived around 200 stopped clocks for permanent display at the UNESCO World Heritage site. His Stuttgart workshop produces four watch series: the Regulator Series, Classic Black Series, Classic Silver Series, and White Roman Series. Each watch is unique, handmade to the finest detail, with a motto: 'Unique Watches for Unique People.' A Premium Service Package includes a 7-year warranty, first revision, annual spring check, performance adjustments after three months, second leather strap, individual engraving, and a travelling watch box.
The brand itself is a second act that Cornehl prepared for decades. The son and grandson of master bakers — his first horological fascination was the old pocket watch hanging in his father's bakery, which he had to promise not to take apart — he gathered experience as a watchmaker at Juwelier Depperich in Reutlingen and in Blancpain's after-sales service, built his first precision pendulum clock in 2000, and from the beginning equipped his Stuttgart atelier with tools chosen for making watches, not merely repairing them, including an antique wheel-cutting machine from 1890 on which he still cuts the gears for his own designs.
He has said he always took the word 'Uhrmacher' literally: his workshop was to be a delivery room for new watches, not only a convalescent home for old ones. The collection reached the market in 2016, launched with his wife Ulrike at the Munichtime and Viennatime fairs, and inside the steel cases tick extensively hand-refined Unitas ébauches whose original bridges are replaced with Cornehl's own matte-gilded three-quarter plates — with hand-guilloché regulator dials and rose gold cases added as the range has grown. The Regulator series distils his love of the observatory precision pendulum clocks and marine chronometers he restores, with a small hour display deferring to a commanding central minute hand; his stated ambition for the future is a fully in-house calibre, and his stated philosophy is that the watches should outlast generations both technically and aesthetically — exactly like the mid-century hand-wound pieces he admires, still regulating to precision sixty years on. The Peterhof restoration circle, formally the Fachkreis Historische Uhren Schloss Raesfeld e.V., even maintains its own workshop in the palace park in St. Petersburg — a fitting emblem for a watchmaker whose new watches are, in his words, interpretations of watch history cast into unique masterpieces.