PS Horology

PS Horology is the solo return of Peter Speake, a British watchmaker with more than thirty-five years in the trade who trained at Hackney College in London before completing his studies at WOSTEP in Neuchâtel and beginning his career in the early 1990s restoring antique and vintage timepieces in Piccadilly. Between 1996 and 2000 he worked at Renaud & Papi in Le Locle, and in 2002 he co-founded Speake-Marin, remaining its watchmaker until 2017, when he departed and sold his stake in the brand that still carries his name today under different ownership. The five years that followed took Speake to an educational watchmaking platform with privileged access to both mainstream commercial houses and independent artisanal workshops, deconstructing, photographing, and demonstrating an extensive range of movements from the inside out — an experience that fed directly into a body of guest collaborations including Harry Winston's Ex-Centre Tourbillon, the very first MB&F creation, Horological Machine N° 1, Maitres du Temps' Chapter 1, a Only Watch edition for WOSTEP, Frédérique Constant's QP, and Schwarz Etienne's Phoenix. In 2022 Speake founded PS Horology in his own name, an independent Swiss house built to create limited-edition timepieces inspired by culture, history, and artistry drawn from around the world.

The brand's debut collection, Tsuba, takes its name and case geometry from the tsuba — the shaped guard fitted between a Japanese sword's blade and grip, which protected the hand and balanced the weapon and which, over the Edo period, evolved from a purely functional fitting into an ornately crafted heirloom passed down through samurai families as a mark of lineage. Designed with Darren Jones and developed from 2019 through more than a year of prototyping, the Tsuba case fuses two classic guard silhouettes — the quince, whose four-lobed cross-section symbolised prosperity, and the octagon, whose eight sides were considered sacred and stable in ancient Japan — into a single scalloped, cushion-shaped form finished across five separate stages of brushing and polishing. Every reference shares the same 316L stainless steel case, 38.3mm across excluding the crown and 8.91mm thick, with sapphire front and back and 3 ATM water resistance, offered on either an integrated bracelet or a strap, the two not interchangeable. All three models share the same movement: the Vaucher Manufacture calibre 5401, made in Fleurier, Switzerland, an automatic micro-rotor calibre just 2.60mm thick and 30mm (13¼ lignes) across, built from 176 components with 29 synthetic jewels, its personalised tungsten micro-rotor turning on a ceramic ball race, running at 3 Hz (21,600 vph) on a free-sprung balance with 48 hours of power reserve.

The Tsuba Blue draws on Speake's own English roots, its blued hands and screws echoing the H4 marine chronometer and the Prussian-blue finish recently uncovered beneath decades of pollution-blackened paint on Big Ben, its dial cut from sapphire with an anodised metal frame and printed detail; limited to 100 pieces, it is sold through PS Horology directly as well as Miluxe in Vietnam and Martin Pulli in the United States. The Tsuba Suhail, created with Riyadh retail partner Crown & Compass and limited to just 10 pieces sold exclusively through that boutique, honours Suhail — Canopus, the second-brightest star in the sky and a navigational touchstone of Arab astronomy, whose appearance historically signalled the desert's turn from summer heat toward cooler nights — on a hand-finished 18k red gold dial whose circular graining evokes the movement of stars across a desert sky. The Tsuba Dong Son, limited to 80 pieces and available through PS Horology and Miluxe, translates the concentric drum motifs and spear-shaped silhouettes of Vietnam's Dong Son Bronze Age culture (flourishing roughly 1000 BC to the 1st century AD) onto a hand-finished 18k gold dial offered in Ultramarine or Slate, its 2024 completion marking a century since the Dong Son civilisation's discovery and its 2025 launch coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Each edition stands as, in the brand's own words, an ambassador of its own cultural story — proof that Speake's second act is exploring a far wider map than the English watchmaking codes that first defined his career.