Frank Jutzi

Frank Jutzi, born in Bern in 1963, runs a quietly remarkable atelier on the Bernstrasse in Wichtrach, the small town between Bern and Thun that gives his workshop its unhurried rhythm — open Tuesday through Saturday, the kind of place where visitors are still genuinely welcomed at the door. As the son of a furniture and interior designer, he was confronted with the language of form from childhood, and the instinct surfaced early: within the first weeks of his own apprenticeship, he had already built the base of a table clock with a skeleton movement. In 1985 he opened his own workshop restoring antique watches and clocks — a craft lineage still running alongside his creative work today — with the explicit aim of eventually realizing his own ideas too. That aim crystallized publicly in 1998, when he exhibited a two-month-going grandfather clock with a fully transparent movement at the AHCI booth at Baselworld, earning candidate status with the Académie des Horlogers Créateurs Indépendants; he was accepted as a full member in 2000, and in 2001 completed his first tourbillon wristwatch as one of seven watchmakers selected for the Goldpfeil group's 'Seven Masters' project. He describes himself simply as an innovative creator of modern table clocks and wristwatches, adding, tellingly, that his favourite pieces are mysterieuses and tourbillons — two of horology's most theatrical and demanding genres, and the two that have defined his life's work ever since.

His wristwatch catalogue reads like a tour of serious complications rendered at human scale. The flagship L'Art du Tourbillon series houses a Swiss-made Concepto 8950-A automatic movement (30.40mm, 27 jewels, 28,800 vph, personalized central rotor) with a 60-hour reserve and a one-minute tourbillon at 6 o'clock inside a 42mm case in 18ct gold or steel, its polished and sculpted hands cut in the ploughshare style of the Wichtrach coat of arms — a small, deeply personal signature, chosen because the ploughshare stands not just for rural life but for the emblem of nascent life itself, secured behind a sapphire caseback closed with six screws and, on the gold version, a personalized deployante buckle. A separate hand-skeletonized wristwatch skeletonizes a manual-wind movement entirely by hand in German silver, delivering 53 hours of reserve inside an 18ct red gold case — limited to just three pieces. The regulator wristwatch with moon phase takes a different route to originality: rather than starting from scratch, Jutzi builds an entirely new module onto an existing base movement to add the offset regulator display and moon phase, finished with a silver hand-guilloché dial and steel numeral collar in 18ct gold. And the lunar phase, small seconds, and second-time-zone wristwatch — CHF 8,300, limited to 40 pieces — layers a similarly bespoke module onto an automatic base, its enamel-white dial reading moon phase at 10, a second zone at 2, and small seconds at 6; every dial in the collection carries an engraved serial number and Jutzi's own hand signature.

But wristwatches are only half the story. Jutzi's true specialty — and the larger share of his portfolio — lies in table clocks, floor clocks, and above all his beloved mysterieuses, timepieces whose hands appear to float and turn with no visible connection to a movement, an illusion horology has prized since the 19th century. His floor clocks include a stately traditional grandfather clock, a direct descendant of the transparent-movement piece that first won him AHCI candidacy in 1998; his table clocks range from the playful to the monumental — a triangular case, a table clock cased in rock crystal plates, a planetarium clock combining a perpetual calendar with a full astrolabium display, and the 'Chronos,' a unique piece combining minute repetition with a tourbillon. His mysterieuse clocks push the illusion further still: a mysterious moon clock, a mysterious tourbillon skeleton clock whose hands seem to hover unsupported, a hummingbird-themed piece pairing a jumping hour with a mysterious tourbillon, and a three-figure 'Caryatids' clock supporting a tourbillon movement on sculpted classical forms. Almost every piece is offered on request or as a unique or small-series creation — the deliberate, unhurried output of a genuine one-man Swiss atelier, an AHCI member for over two decades, working equally in wristwatches and clocks in the tradition of horology's oldest and most theatrical branches.