Artistic Metiers

At Cartier’s Maison des Métiers d’Art, tradition and innovation collide in the most enrapturing and scintillating manner, learns CANDICE CHAN

- Candice Chan

IT’S NOT surprising that Cartier should own one of the largest watch factories in Switzerland. As one of the most commercially successful luxury brands, its 33,000sqm Fine Watchmaking Manufacture is packed with state-of-the-art equipment and long assembly lines of automated machinery churning out components like clockwork to meet gruelling production demands. But despite its high-tech façade, the human touch is quintessential in the making of a Cartier timepiece. Perhaps the most exemplary of Cartier’s reliance on human ingenuity can be found in its Maison des Métiers d’Art, located in a small 18th-century Bernese-style farm next to the Fine Watchmaking Manufacture.

Although much of the building’s exterior has been kept intact, most of its interiors (aside from the roof and Bordeaux tiles) have been completely redesigned to accommodate two important departments: High Watchmaking and Metiers d’Art. It should be noted that Cartier is only one of a handful of watch manufacturers to boast an in-house team of artists; most brands engage and rely on external independent parties — also few and far between — to work on their artistic watches.

In the Metiers d’Art workshop, Cartier’s 30-strong team of artisans breathe life into ancestral crafts such as enamel (of which Cartier has mastered several techniques, such as miniature painting, cloisonné, champlevé, grisaille and plique-à-jour enamelling), marquetry (stone, straw, floral, gold leaf and wood), gem-setting and more unusual art forms like granulation, flamed gold and filigree. These traditional methods cannot be replicated by a machine as they are the result of a tedious and complicated process that requires the expertise and intuition of a trained artisan.