Holthinrichs Watches
Holthinrichs Watches is the Delft, Netherlands atelier of Michiel Holthinrichs — the architect who brought serious 3D metal printing to fine watchmaking and is now building what he calls the first Dutch watch manufacture. The son of an artist and an automotive engineer, he grew up among art and classic cars, studied architecture at the Delft University of Technology (specializing in the renovation of national heritage buildings and the transformation of historic structures), and was profoundly marked by a stay in Paris, where the craftsmanship and detail of Art Nouveau and Art Deco turned his attention to beauty at the small scale. He discovered that everything he loved about architecture — line, proportion, spatial and structural complexity — existed in fine watches, and funded his studies by servicing and selling vintage pieces. His graduation project became a watch: after four years of design and prototyping, a first client found him online and commissioned a piece for his wedding — the Ornament 1, the world's first 3D-printed stainless steel watch, powered by a Peseux 7001 with its now-signature sub-second layout. That commission, around 2016, was the founding act of the brand, and its philosophy has never wavered: 'architecture on the wrist.' Five years later the RAW Ornament Bronze codified his concept of Horlogerie Brut — textures, finishes, and colors derived directly from manufacturing processes and raw material properties — and introduced the in-house Breguet-inspired numeral font that runs through the catalogue.
Today the atelier — newly headquartered in Delft's historic Armory building — is a young multidisciplinary team of watchmakers, industrial designers, product developers, an aerospace engineer, a goldsmith, and an architect (plus Wammes, the Rottweiler-mix 'chef security'), working with everything from state-of-the-art laser cutting to lovingly restored century-old lathes. The 2024 Signature series made the design language a permanent, more accessible collection: the Signature Ornament (EUR 3,500 excl. VAT) in a 38.5mm × 9.85mm grade 5 titanium case whose dramatically curved, seemingly detached lugs sweep like the wheel arches of classic sports cars, with a multi-layered dial — heavily textured metal in yellow gold, rose gold, or white/black rhodium beneath a double-domed sapphire carrying floating printed indices — a modified Sellita SW300 with an Art Nouveau 'sunrise' rotor behind it. The Signature Ornament Delft Blue (EUR 3,750) honors the home city with a white ceramic dial and deep-blue Breguet-style numerals — and a story to match, for Delft's horological pedigree is real: three Delft clockmakers built Salisbury Cathedral's famous clock, Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum a few kilometers away in 1656, and Delft clockmaker Coenraad Brouckman built possibly the first tower clock designed around it in 1660.
At the expressive end sit the LAB Series — 3D-printed titanium cases with lugs skeletonized almost to breaking point, and hand-made dials milled from solid brass, hand-carved, and given forced copper patinas through electrolysis and heat so that no two are alike (one 30-piece edition was created with Chris Alexander, 'The Dial Artist,' who applies gold leaf to the patinated surfaces). The newest LAB 1.S and 1.GMT pay tribute to the Ornament 1 of ten years ago: the 1.S with deeply carved Art Deco-like radiating relief holding azure-blue oxide in its depths, the 1.GMT with an azimuthal North Pole projection of the Earth, hand-brushed patina, and brass Breguet-style GMT indicators — both with hand-scraped, heat-blued tungsten rotors. Above it all looms the Ornament Nouveau, the haute horlogerie project in development since 2017 that carries the brand's first fully in-house movement and earned a GPHG nomination — the boldest step yet from a maker Worn & Wound calls one of contemporary independent watchmaking's great characters, on a self-declared crusade with a distinctly Dutch sensibility. Bespoke commissions, the original conceit of the brand, remain on offer.