IN CONVERSATION WITH: MICHAEL TAY, GROUP MANAGING DIRECTOR, THE HOUR GLASS
You joined The Hour Glass in 1999 and one of your first initiatives was to champion artisanal independent watchmaking. Why?
The Hour Glass’s story with contemporary independent artisans, designers and brands began in 1981 when my parents partnered Gérald Genta to launch his eponymous brand in Southeast Asia.
Genta had already achieved international acclaim as the man who brought contemporary design to the watch industry. The Nautilus and Royal Oak were watches that captured the zeitgeist of the post-Quartz Crisis era, developing a new sports-luxe language for watches. This transformational movement laid the blueprint for a defining design arc that would inform watchmakers for the next five decades.
At the turn of the ’80s, he had introduced a collection named “Gold and Gold”, based off an octagonal case with a detachable bracelet that featured these super-chic bamboo bars. As Genta wasn’t technically a watchmaker per se, he found a partner in Pierre-Michel Golay. A technical genius with the ability to construct some of the most beautiful-sounding repeaters. Golay eventually created a Grande Sonnerie for Genta, cementing his stature as a watch designer extraordinaire and one of a literal handful of brands in the ’80s and ’90s capable of producing highly technical, highly complicated watches.
At one point, all of Cartier’s high complications — golf watches, perpetual calendars, skeleton tourbillons and minute repeaters were produced in-house by Gérald Genta S.A.. Even today, all of Bulgari’s existing repeaters and tourbillons are still based off these seminal constructions by Pierre-Michel Golay.
The second independent watchmaker we started working with was Philippe Dufour. Most aren’t aware that we financed Philippe’s first four Grande Sonnerie wristwatches back in 1991. This came shortly after he had completed his first Grande Sonnerie pocket watches for Audemars Piguet. Philippe had decided he would strike out on his own and, with keen ambition, wanted to produce the world’s first Grande Sonnerie wristwatch. A mutual friend had suggested to him that The Hour Glass might be interested, so he visited Singapore. We met him and ordered his very first four watches. That’s how our relationship with Dufour began. Out of the original run of six Grande Sonnerie wristwatches, the first four bore enamel dials while No. 5 and No. 6 had sapphire dials. We sold 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6. Philippe had placed No. 5 with someone else in America and I would later hunt that watch down and acquire it.
In 1994, we got involved with Daniel Roth, a few years after he had established his own namesake brand. Roth was the man behind the revival of the tourbillon wristwatch in the ’80s when he was Chef d’Atelier for Breguet. François Bodet, then Director-General of Breguet, had opened a workshop for the brand in the Vallée de Joux. His first hire was Daniel Roth who had previously been a pivot maker. Together with Bodet, they had planned to recreate Breguet’s greatest invention — the tourbillon. At the time, Breguet was owned by the Chaumet brothers and was known primarily as a watch brand producing bejewelled watches.
The reason I’m relaying stories about these individuals is because we often think independent watchmaking began with this new millennium. But really, it started well before that. The first and possibly most important independent watchmaker of the 20th century was George Daniels. He invented this romantic notion of the unilateral watchmaker. In many ways, he inspired traditionalists the likes of Philippe Dufour and François-Paul Journe. Then [Gérald] Genta became a big success in the ’80s followed by Franck Muller in the ’90s.
The groundwork for our appreciation of
