Habring²

Habring² is one of the most technically accomplished and genuinely independent watchmaking projects in the world — a husband-and-wife atelier run by Richard and Maria Kristina Habring from their workshop in Völkermarkt, in the Carinthia region of southern Austria, producing a maximum of fifty watches per year, with no more than twelve pieces per model. Every single watch is finished by their own hands. The brand's motto — 'made with love' — is not marketing copy but a literal description of how each timepiece comes to exist.

Richard Habring's formation is exceptional. He trained at the Karlstein an der Thaya watchmaking school in Lower Austria, founded in 1878 and one of the most rigorous horological academies in the German-speaking world. The first clock to bear the Habring signature was made in 1985, his first year there. His talents were recognised early: while every Karlstein graduate constructs a regulator to study manufacturing methods, Richard's teachers soon gave him additional projects far beyond the standard curriculum. His first hand-drawn design for a perpetual calendar — produced long before CAD — still hangs in the school library. Just over a year after graduating, he returned to sit his Master's examination and presented, to the astonishment of the examination board, a voluntary masterpiece: a self-designed, self-made minute tourbillon in a tiny inline movement. From 1989 onward, a small number of individual pieces bearing the signature 'Richard Habring' — mainly tourbillons and complicated chronographs — were created and acquired by private collectors; some appeared in specialist literature (among them 'Das Tourbillion' by Reinhard Meis, published by Callwey); others achieved significant bids at Antiquorum and at the auction house Dr. Crott. Among the most remarkable was a double-axis tourbillon from 1996 — at the time the first in the world in pocket watch size, though ultimately housed in a clock due to power reserve and reliability constraints.

Richard's professional development became deeply intertwined with that of Günter Blümlein, the legendary CEO of LMH (Les Manufactures Horlogères, the parent of IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and A. Lange & Söhne) who became his mentor and patron. Together they developed many of the complicated movements and grand complications produced for the LMH brands in the 1990s — several of which became bestsellers. It was through this network that Richard met Maria Kristina; the couple decided to share both their private and professional lives, and in October 2004, following Blümlein's death in 2001, they realised their dream of a small watchmaker's factory with the launch of the first HABRING². Since then the collection has grown by one model per year at most, with production deliberately held to a maximum of fifty pieces annually and never more than twelve per reference — a discipline that makes every Habring² genuinely rare.

The technical heart of Habring² is their proprietary movement architecture, developed by Richard from the ground up. All current movements run at 28,800 alternations per hour (4Hz), use anti-magnetic Carl Haas balance springs of chronometer quality, and are finished elaborately by hand with polished bevels, decorative grinding, and perlage. Cases are 316L stainless steel (Böhler A200/A220), 38.5mm diameter as standard, with domed sapphire crystals, double crown seals, sapphire casebacks, and consecutively engraved serial numbers between the lugs. Each watch is delivered in a handmade four-part wooden box of brushed and oiled Oregon pine, with an integrated spare parts compartment — a detail that encapsulates the Habrings' relationship with their clients and their commitment to longevity. All movements carry a three-year warranty on production faults.

The rattrapante split-seconds chronograph — which Habring² calls the Doppel ('double') — is the signature complication and the one that has brought the brand the most attention in the watchmaking world. Where other brands building split-seconds mechanisms at comparable prices use modified ébauches or outsourced modules, Richard Habring designed his from scratch. The current Doppel 38 (Calibre A11R_H1, 30mm diameter, 7mm height, 98 service-relevant components, 27 rubies, 48 hours power reserve) is a fully in-house split-seconds chronograph with hour, minute, small running seconds at 9 o'clock, a stop-seconds hand, 30-minute counter, and split-seconds hand — all in a 38.5mm case with sunken registers and circular finish. Earlier Doppel generations were equally celebrated: the Doppel 2.0 (2012) won the GPHG Mechanical Exception prize; the Doppel-Felix won the GPHG in 2018. The Perpetual-Doppel combined a split-seconds chronograph with a perpetual calendar — one of the rarest and most demanding complications combinations in horology. The Doppel 3, presented in 2013 and exhibited at Horlogerie Suisse 2014, was a further evolution.

The foudroyante — the 'flashing' or 'lightning' seconds, in which a hand sweeps a full revolution in one second, subdividing it into fractions visible to the naked eye — is Habring²'s other signature technical achievement. Richard Habring holds a patent on his deadbeat centre-seconds device, and the Foudroyante-Felix combines this with a true foudroyante hand running continuously from the escapement, requiring no separate mechanism. Habring² is one of only two brands in the world offering a continuously running foudroyante of this type. The Foudroyante-Felix (Calibre A11F, 30mm diameter, 6.6mm height, 23 jewels, 45 hours power reserve) is available in 38.5mm with the foudroyante at 9 o'clock; the Foudroyante-Felix-Date (Calibre A11FD) adds a pointer date and is available in 42mm. A Jumping Second — a true deadbeat central seconds hand that advances precisely once per second, driven directly from the escapement without a separate module — has also been a continuous part of the Habring² offer, GPHG-recognised in the Jumping Second Pilot (2013 prize winner).

The current collection centres on the named model families that have evolved since the brand's founding in 2004. The Felix is the foundational time-only three-hander, available in numerous dial and finish variants and the canvas for many of the brand's limited editions and special collaborations. The Erwin is the automatic companion. The Chrono-Felix adds the in-house chronograph. The Smart-Felix (also known as the Globetrotter) adds a second time zone. Oskar, introduced for the brand's 20th anniversary in 2024, adds a moon phase; Josef, also introduced in 2024, is a new complication model. The Jorge is the result of the most significant external collaboration in Habring² history: a partnership with Jochen Benzinger, the celebrated German engraver and movement decorator based in Pforzheim, whose hand-guilloché dials and movement engravings have elevated the work of Voutilainen, Urban Jürgensen, and many others. The Benzinger × Habring² Jorge (Calibre A11JBM, 30mm diameter, 5.5mm height) introduces an entirely new movement architecture with hour and minute hands, small seconds and moon phase at 8 o'clock, and pointer date at 4 o'clock, running at 4Hz with 48 hours power reserve and featuring a 'Wiener'-click — a Viennese watchmaking detail — alongside a hand-guilloché dial by Benzinger. The Jorge's case is 38.5mm (lug-to-lug 47mm), 9mm high without crystal.

Habring² has also produced special editions in collaboration with the watch community: the COS-Felix (co-designed with owners), Japan Editions for selected Japanese retailers, and a series of CronotempVs festival pieces. The brand has won four GPHG awards — in 2012 (Doppel 2.0, Mechanical Exception), 2013 (Jumping Second Pilot), 2015 (Felix), and 2018 (Doppel-Felix) — making it one of the most decorated small independent watchmakers in the award's history relative to its output volume.