Our Story
A boutique founded on an eye
Wear Your Time. We do not make watches — we find the exceptional ones, verify them without shortcuts, and place them on the right wrist.
Our Origin
1958
Henri Chastel spent eleven years selling watches for other people before he sold one for himself. He was, by the account of those who worked beside him, a difficult colleague: he refused pieces whose histories could not be accounted for, and he argued that a fine watch offered without provenance was only an object with a price on it. In 1958 the argument was settled by his resignation.
He took two rooms above a bookbinder on the Rue de la Corraterie and opened a boutique with eleven watches in the window, every one of them bought from a collector he knew personally. The first year he sold nine. Three of those nine have since come back through the same door, offered to us before anyone else.
What Henri set down in that first vitrine was not a style but a refusal. He would not sell a piece he had not examined. He would not describe a watch more generously than its condition deserved. He would not stock quickly to fill a window. Those three refusals became the house, and they remain the only instructions given to the people who work here.
A Legacy in Motion
Sixty-eight years, told briefly
1958
A single window on the Corraterie
Henri Chastel opens a two-room boutique in Geneva with eleven watches in the vitrine, all of them bought from collectors he knew by name.
1963
A reputation for finding things
Word spreads that the shop will spend a year tracking down one reference. Dealers across Switzerland begin offering pieces to the boutique first.
1971
The register
Every watch that passes through the vitrine is recorded by serial, seller and buyer — a provenance archive the boutique still keeps today.
1984
The authentication workshop
An in-house workshop opens behind the salon so no piece is sold before it has been opened, verified and serviced by our own watchmakers.
1996
Beyond Geneva
Relationships with ateliers and estates across Europe and Japan turn a local boutique into a source for collectors on three continents.
2009
The restoration bench
A dedicated restorer joins the workshop to bring neglected pieces back honestly — conserved rather than made to look new.
2018
The online vitrine
The collection goes online, photographed and documented as carefully as it is shown in the salon, with the same guarantee behind it.
Today
One boutique, the whole world
From the same Geneva address, every piece ships insured and worldwide — the vitrine is now wherever the client happens to be.
Our Philosophy
Four words, in order
Provenance
Every piece arrives with a history we can account for: where it came from, who owned it, what has been done to it, written down.
Trust
Nothing is listed before our workshop has opened it. If a dial has been refinished or a part replaced, it is stated plainly in the description.
Discernment
We turn away far more than we take. A watch enters the vitrine only when we would be content to keep it ourselves.
Posterity
We sell for the next owner as much as the present one. A piece that leaves us should be worth passing on again.
The Workshop
Fourteen people, every piece opened
The workshop occupies the same two floors behind the salon it has occupied since 1963. Nothing reaches the vitrine unopened. Casebacks come off, serials are read against factory records, and dials are examined under magnification for the faint halo that betrays a refinish.
Movements are stripped, cleaned and regulated in six positions over fourteen days. Where a part must be replaced, an original is sought first and the substitution is written into the record either way. Cases are conserved rather than polished; metal removed to flatter a photograph never comes back.
Between forty and three hundred hours are spent on a single piece before it is offered, depending on what it has lived through. Only then is it photographed, described, and placed in the window.
40+
Hours of checks
14
Specialists
1 in 9
Pieces accepted
Time Talks
“I have never believed that a watch should announce itself. It should be correct, and it should be quiet, and it should come with its history intact. My work was never to make them — it was to find the ones worth keeping and to say honestly what they had been through.”
Recognition
Quietly noted
- 2009Distinction for provenance research, Geneva
- 2014Cited for authentication standards, Salon Genève
- 2019“The most careful vitrine in Switzerland” — The Chronometry Review
- 2023Recognised for ethical sourcing by the Responsible Metals Council
Placeholder entries, shown until the boutique’s press record is added.
Our Commitment
What we owe the material, and the owner
Materials
No watch enters the vitrine without documented provenance. Where a stone or a part has been replaced, the record says so.
The Workshop
Our watchmakers are trained and employed directly by the boutique rather than contracted, and the workshop runs on renewable power.
Lifetime Service
Any piece bought from us may be returned to Geneva for servicing for as long as it exists, whoever owns it at the time.
