Van Bricht

Founded in 2019 by Bernard van Ormelingen (b.2000, Namur) and Sébastien Lambricht (b.1990) — named for their surnames — who met at the watchmaking school of Namur.

The brand began with a midnight conversation: after a long night talking watches, they decided to start their own brand, and by 8am the first sketches were ready. Their garage-workshop in Louvrange, 30km south-east of Brussels, is as far from Switzerland as a watchmaker can get — yet from this converted garage (in the spirit of Bordeaux's 'garage wines') they create watches of genuine Haute Horlogerie standard, against all odds, including scepticism from their own school and Bernard's parents. Van Ormelingen is obsessed with decoration: his 120-year-old, 700kg Lienhard guilloché machine — shipped to America before the First World War and repatriated from Canada — was restored by hand with his father and grandfather. Lambricht specialises in casing and movements; third colleague Guillaume Melin handles black-polishing using boxwood, copper, and steel, entirely by hand and instinct. The Old Mind Tourbillon (40mm, €45,000, 25 pieces) features calibre VB2129: a BCP tourbillon base fully remade — bridges, baseplate, cage, adjusting, and hammering all done in Belgium. Tourbillon cage at 6 o'clock with large aperture. Hand-guilloché moiré or barleycorn dial uniquely centred on the tourbillon rather than the movement centre — a Van Bricht signature. Bleached silver dial using traditional acid for deeper tone. Sapphire caseback just 0.003mm from the movement. 110-hour power reserve, 3Hz, patent-pending casing system and buckle. 'We had a dream and just went with it. If it doesn't work, at least we have a really great watch for ourselves.'

Lambricht brought a different kind of grounding to the partnership: after an internship at Rolex Benelux and a stint in Patek Philippe Benelux's after-sales department, he worked as a watchmaker at the Tollet jewellery house in Brussels before spending four years at the Chronograph Company in Genval, servicing brands including Bell & Ross, Raidillon, Lebeau-Courally, Louis Erard, Vulcain, and Raymond Weil — a breadth of practical repair experience that complements Van Ormelingen's obsessive decorative focus. That focus earned Van Ormelingen recognition as one of the youngest guillocheurs working anywhere in the world, a distinction Bloomberg highlighted when it profiled the then-21-year-old Belgian making watches priced around $50,000 from a converted garage. The brand's own account of its founding has become something of a local legend: after a single sleepless night spent talking watches, the two had sketches ready by eight the next morning, despite scepticism from their own watchmaking school and, in Bernard's case, from his own parents. That defiance has held: the Old Mind remains capped at a tight run of pieces per series, entirely hand-cased and hand-guilloché in Louvrange, with every component of the reworked BCP tourbillon base — bridges, baseplate, cage — finished and adjusted in Belgium rather than sent back to Switzerland for any stage of production.