“In the beginning it was not the goal to be independent, to create a brand,” the independent watchmaker Raúl Pagès said in his two-room hillside atelier in the Swiss hamlet Les Brenets, overlooking the Jura Mountains. “It was just to design a movement, to create something from scratch.”
It is here, in a house that what was once a factory making synthetic rubies, that Mr. Pagès — the first recipient of the Louis Vuitton Watch Prize for Independent Creatives — produces about four handmade watches per year.
At the moment, he is focusing on the production of the Régulateur à détente RP1, the wristwatch that earned him the award. But the 40-year-old Mr. Pagès, who started his brand in 2012, also makes automatons — the kind of mechanically moving figures that were all the rage in the 18th and 19th centuries.
“I felt that it was strange that nobody was making automatons today, so as my first creation I did not want to make a watch, I wanted to make a full automaton, but contemporary,” he said before using a key to wind the Tortoise — a grapefruit-size automaton that he finished in 2013.
For a minute, its diamond-clawed legs made a whirring sound as they crawled about a foot along a watchmaker’s bench. “Yes,” Mr. Pagès said, looking at a visitor. “That is always the reaction from collectors and other people — always smiling, always big eyes.”
