Into The Woods

Nicolette Wong gets a rare peek into Franck Muller’s dial manufacture

- Nicolette Wong

SOME PEOPLE THINK THAT watch dials are just stamped on and that’s it, done! If only it were really that easy!” These words, uttered by a man named Jean-Paul Boillat, were part joke, part frustration. Boillat is the director at Les Fils d’Arnold Linder, the exclusive producer of Franck Muller’s distinctively eye-catching dials. His domain, a small building nestled in a small Swiss town called Les Bois or “the woods” in the snow-capped Jura mountains, looks nondescript from the outside bar a green sign bearing the name of the company. The simplicity of its surroundings merely serves to emphasise the exquisite nature of the dials the company produces. Everything, including the shaping and cutting of the dials, painting, and diamond setting, is done here.

The task of taking us around the dial manufacture fell to Alain Vionnet, the manufacture’s production manager, who assured us that the dials were most definitely not just stamped in 5sec. We knew that we were about to witness a laborious manufacturing process, so it came as quite the shock when, at the very beginning of the tour, Vionnet quite placidly broke a finished mother-of-pearl dial in half. Once the gasps had subsided, he explained that the dial was already doomed before he broke it. Despite its seemingly gleaming appearance, it was actually damaged, scratched in some microscopic way, and therefore unacceptable according to Franck Muller’s stringent standards.