Eva Leube

Eva Leube is a Berlin-born master watchmaker whose path to independence ran through some of the biggest names in the industry — and whose singular creation, the curved wristwatch Ari, took four years and a career's worth of accumulated skill to realize. Raised in a family of scientists (her grandfather, a rocket-ballistics physicist during the war, later built deadweight-force standard measuring machines still used today at Germany's PTB metrology institute), Leube grew up believing, in her grandfather's words, that any mechanism could be understood if you simply looked at it long enough. She began her apprenticeship at 16 and earned her Master Watchmaker diploma at just 23. Her career then circled the globe: a fourth-generation family watch company in Lucerne, Chronos Master Watchmakers in Cape Town, a Rolex course in Geneva, and a posting with Rolex Australia in Sydney — where, after finishing her first marathon in Canberra in 2003 and riding the resulting flood of dopamine for a week, she resolved she was 'born for more' and turned toward independent, hand-made unique timepieces. In 2004 she returned to Europe to work with Ulysse Nardin, then spent two pivotal years alongside Thomas Prescher, the master of complications, building custom pieces with retrograde displays and multiple-axis flying tourbillons.

After thirteen years absorbing lessons from some of the best in the business, Leube returned to Australia, and following the birth of her son, set up her own workshop to chase a singular vision: a watch that curved elegantly around the wrist like a piece of jewellery, its movement arcing gracefully with the case rather than sitting flat beneath a crystal. Four years of development later, Ari debuted at Baselworld 2011 to great acclaim. Available in 18k gold or platinum 950, the 52.44mm case wraps the wrist in a continuous panorama of sapphire — front and both sides — revealing a movement Leube turned inside out for the purpose: in most calibers the crown wheel, ratchet wheel, click, escapement, and balance all face down and out of sight, but on Ari every one of them faces up toward the viewer, the balance itself placed at the top of the case, its oscillations in full view above a small-seconds subdial and a central hours-and-minutes display in traditional heat-blued steel. The reversal demanded real invention — additional intermediate pinions, a reversed escape wheel, a completely reworked pallet fork — and moving the crown from its usual position to the base of the case (at 6 o'clock) via an entirely new hand-setting mechanism hidden inside the mainplate, all to preserve an uninterrupted sapphire window down the case's right side.

The movement itself — a highly modified gear train built from a Record 302 caliber, 209 components, 18 jewels in 18k gold chatons, a free-sprung balance beating at 18,000vph with a 40-hour reserve — carries 'Eva Leube – Hand Made' hand-engraved on the ratchet wheel by master engraver John W. Thompson, who also hand-engraves the case. Now based back in Europe on the shores of Lake Zurich after twenty years working across Australia, South Africa, and the United States, Leube also undertakes restoration and repair of antique timepieces. Among her admissions to The Naked Watchmaker, she named fellow independents Christian Klings and Miki Eleta among those she 'totally and utterly admires' — fitting company for a watchmaker whose own philosophy, offered as advice to anyone considering a similar path, is simple: 'to do what you love for a living — that's the way to live your life.'