Craft Master: Chopard is Building On Its Twin Legacies as a Jeweler and Watchmaker
In 1996, just as the mechanical watchmaking renaissance was getting underway, Chopard, one of the oldest and most respected brands in luxury watchmaking, opened a manufacture In the Swiss village of Fleurier, in a region known as Val-de-Travers, or Twisted Valley, in the Jura Mountains.
The workshop’s focus was on building movements for a line of Chopard watches known as L.U.C, after the company’s founder, Louis-Ulysse Chopard. Designed to stand the test of time and, indeed, given the proper care, to run in perpetuity, L.U.C timepieces remain core to the Chopard collection today.
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Since the manufacture’s opening, Karl-Friedrich Scheufele, co-president of Chopard, has created a horological proving ground in Fleurier for artisans specializing in the full range of watchmaking traditions, from decorative techniques such as Grand Feu enameling to the precision-oriented work of making and decorating the components in the maison’s grand complications, a term referring to timepieces capable of performing multiple micro-mechanical wonders such as indicating the phases of the moon, chiming the hours, and accounting for leap years.
Chopard’s famed L.U.C Full Strike minute repeater with its crystal gong, as well as the brand’s other highly complicated timepieces, are examples of what the maison’s skilled team has been able to accomplish in Fleurier and Geneva, where the brand maintains its headquarters and main production site.
Using contemporary tools, Chopard’s artisans, encouraged by Karl-Friedrich’s unerring devotion to the horological arts, have resurrected long-forgotten traditions such as Fleurisanne engraving. The technique adds delicate floral and ornamental flourishes to a movement. Visible through the sapphire caseback, the decorative touches imbue the timepiece with the spirit of true luxury.
“Mechanical purists will say that any decoration is superfluous, that less is more, because mechanics alone should do the talking,” Scheufele says. “Then there are those who want to make mechanics more beautiful through decorations, a beautiful finish, polishing, beveling, and various means of expressing these skills. With L.U.C watches, we wanted to reconcile the two philosophies. As long as we can perpetuate a watchmaking profession, it is our duty to do so.”
The maison’s twin legacies of excellence in the watchmaking and jewelry realms inform its approach to all its creations. At Chopard’s Geneva high jewelry workshops, for example, the meticulous process of bringing a gem-set timepiece to life begins with a sketch known as a gouache painting, followed by a 3D construction and sculpture, before moving on to the actual crafting of the piece, often concluding with a generous application of diamonds. A gemstone devotee, Caroline Scheufele, Karl-Friedrich’s sister and co-president, carefully vets all the maison’s gemstones with an eye to finding the rarest, most mysterious, and, obviously, the most beautiful.
Meanwhile, Karl-Friedrich oversees the watchmaking, including a slew of metiers d’art performed in-house by the maison’s talented artisans, such as the delicate and time-honored crafts of engraving and marquetry, the latter an esoteric type of inlay work using materials that range from wood to stones to straw.
Chopard’s history of mechanical innovation and metiers d’art comes together at the L.U.CEUM, a museum in Fleurier dedicated to nothing less than the history of time as seen through the lens of the beautiful and complicated instruments that have been created by humankind to measure it. (Its name is a neologism that combines the initials of Chopard’s founder with the Latin word lyceum, meaning a place of learning.)
Opened in 2006, on the 10th anniversary of the Chopard manufacture, the L.U.CEUM marks the culmination of a lifelong dream for Karl-Friedrich, who envisioned the space as a showcase for antique and contemporary watches and clocks organized by theme: “great achievements,” “the measure of precision,” “traveling with time,” etc. In addition to housing timepieces dating back to 1500 A. C., the L.U.CEUM is also a gallery for artworks devoted to the theme of time.
As Chopard looks to the coming decade and beyond, the Scheufeles are shifting their focus to the next generation of artisans. As a patron of the watchmaking arts, Karl-Friedrich is committed to ensuring that his traditional vision of watchmaking includes much more than mere mechanical mastery.
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