Earlier this spring, when the Worn & Wound team was in Switzerland for Watches & Wonders, we had a somewhat impromptu meeting with the Holthinrichs team at a very pleasant but nondescript Geneva coffee shop, somewhat off the beaten path of watch fair hysteria that grips the city during show season. It was there that we got our first look at the Signature Collection, a major shift in strategy for the brand, now planning to offer watches with a familiarly intricate case design but at a much lower price point than previous collections, thanks to new manufacturing partnerships and a retreat from 3D printing, a process that simply became to expensive as the brand’s designs became more complex. Founder Michiel Holthinrichs also told us about an ambitious new project during this meeting, the Ornament Nouveau, a watch that sits squarely in the haute horlogerie space. At that last meeting, Michiel only had renders of the Ornament Nouveau to show us on his phone, and some crude 3D printed prototype cases (in plastic) of the Signature Collection. Just a few months later, I sat down with Michiel and his team once again, at that same coffee shop, and was able to lay my hands on real watches that were every bit as impressive as I had hoped they’d be. It was a particular treat to see the Ornament Nouveau, a watch that the team is immensely proud of. 

A quick caveat – we’re still dealing with prototypes here in the case of the Signature Collection pieces. The team had hoped to be further along in production by this point, but the complexity of nearly every aspect of the design has caused delays. You might notice in these photos that dials are not perfectly aligned, and finishing might not be to a production standard. Still, I came away from handling the Signature Collection pieces thinking that, assuming the brand really can figure out all the little details and put these into production as planned, they have made something quite special. The cases are really unlike anything else on the market at the price point, and the dial designs, particularly the Signature Delft Blue and the Signature Lab Series variants have a lot of depth. The Lab Series piece, which has a skeletonized lug architecture achieved via a 3D printing process, has a real “How Is this Real?” quality to it. It looks delicate, but feels incredibly solid. 

The Ornament Nouveau, however, was the showstopper. The project has been in the works since 2017, when Michiel set out to design a watch with an in-house movement made entirely in the Netherlands. It’s perhaps the most elegant version of the signature Holthinrichs sculpted case, and it brings that aesthetic to the caliber as well for a design that feels remarkably coherent. Inspired by modern architecture and the Art Nouveau movement, Holthinrichs sought production help from partners outside the watch industry but within the Netherlands to complete the project while also applying years of knowledge accumulated from making watches in their own atelier. 

The key feature of the movement, made with the help of a manufacturer skilled in producing micro tools for the medical industry, is a mainplate with a double concave shape. Visible on the dial side, this creates a unique visual impression and gives the movement a unique and almost organic quality. It struck me as a completely different way of thinking about traditional movement decoration, to not just focus on a surface treatment of a particular component, but to play with the three dimensional shape of that component. It’s a natural extension of the sculptural influence that has been at work in Holthinrichs cases all along, and it was very impressive to see in person. 

As someone who has been intrigued by Holthinrichs from the beginning, it’s been a treat to see them develop these new projects in parallel: one, which when perfected should make their core design language more accessible to enthusiasts en masse than ever before, and the other a format for work that is entirely unconstrained, allowing the brand to experiment and indulge their most creative whims, while hopefully bolstering watch manufacturing in the Netherlands. It’s wildly ambitious, to be sure, but big swings are what makes independent watchmaking so much fun. Holthinrichs