Tourbillon Atelier

After his impressive debut with the subscription series, young independent French watchmaker Remy Cools has created his first production watches series, the Tourbillon Atelier, in the same spirit of perpetuating tradition and passing down know-how. Dedicated to the ceaseless refinement of his work, the Tourbillon Atelier is born out of Remy Cools’ motto, “evolve, don’t repeat''.

With a passion fuelled by the works of the great watchmakers and notable marine chronometers of the late 18th and 19th centuries, Remy Cools seeks to continue the legacy of French fine watchmaking and perpetuate the traditional approach to haute horlogerie where artisanship, precision and superlative quality reign supreme. While the Tourbillon Atelier shares the same classically inspired yet instantly recognisable aesthetic as his subscription series, the movement itself as well as the case, dial, hands and crystal are all entirely new, designed and built from scratch for his first production series.

With his background in restoration watchmaking, Remy Cools strives to incorporate as many handcrafted and traditional fabrication methods in his work as possible, to create watches that can be durable and serviced in the distant future,  in the same way that he restores timekeepers from centuries past to their former glory. The choice of materials as well as the techniques employed are to ensure this longevity.

In designing the Tourbillon Atelier, particular attention was paid to keeping the proportions as compact as possible. The platinum case measures 39mm in diameter and 12mm in height, including the raised and domed 3mm height sapphire crystal that allows for a panoramic view of the dial-side tourbillon and off-centred, seemingly floating small hours and minutes dial. Set atop either a rose gold or yellow gold dial plate with a finely grained finish, the silver dials are paired round-polished convex steel hands, crafted and finished by hand.

The centrepiece of the dial, the tourbillon, is held by a single bridge beveled and polished by hand. Within the tourbillon carriage measuring 13.2mm in diameter with three polished spokes, the hairspring features a Breguet overcoil that has been painstakingly formed by hand. Oscillating at a frequency of 2.5Hz (18,000 vb/h ), the balance wheel and tourbillon mechanism are carefully adjusted  and poised for optimal chronometric performance.

Finished in a yellow gold tone matching the dial, the hand-wound movement is composed of 235 components, each of them decorated by hand – including the ones that the wearer will likely never see. Remy Cools firmly believes that decoration is there to embellish a piece, not to define it. The finishing techniques of the Tourbillon Atelier were chosen to be coherent with the overall design and architecture of the movement, without even a single element feeling superfluous of serving solely as a demonstration of the watchmaker’s prowess.

The Remy Cools Tourbillon Atelier is a limited series of 36 pieces in total, with 12 pieces made per year according to the customers’ choices of yellow gold or rose gold dials.