The wunderkind of watchmaking

REXHEP Rexhepi is still the new kid on the block, a neophyte; but this 36-year-old is fast acquiring the rock-star status of watchmakers twice his age.

His exquisite timepieces, painstakingly hand-crafted and hand-finished in the old school way, start from around S$80,000, but still have a waiting list that stretches for years – as long as those of FP Journe or even Philippe Dufour.

Master watchmakers, including the great Finn Kari Voutilainen, has heaped praises on the boy wonder from Kosovo. Even Patek Philippe’s boss Thierry Stern is pushing collectors to him.

At the 2018 Grand Prix de Horlogerie de Geneve, the watch industry’s equivalent to Hollywood’s Academy Awards, Rexhepi’s Chronometre Contemporain, a distinctive take on the classical dress watch that tells time with high precision, bagged the prize for the men’s best watch.

Such feats at a young age would have done any watchmaker proud. Yet Rexhepi appears unsatisfied. “‘Proud’ isn’t a word I would use to describe my watches,” says the Geneva-based watchmaker in a recent interview in Singapore.

“I’m never happy with what we do; I always think we could have done more.”

Rexhepi has already spent more than half his life in watchmaking.

Obsessed with timepieces since he was a boy, he left his home for Switzerland in his teens and was an apprentice at Patek Philippe from the age of 15 to 18.

At 25, in 2012, he struck out on his own.

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“(From) the start, whatever we do it must be well done, good quality, good decoration,” he says. And he wants the watches made with parts, especially the movements, produced in-house.

“Since 2014, all our watches have had in-house movements, (which is) quite rare.”

Still, while the movements are conceived internally, he has to rely on outside sources for nearly half of the components to make them. “My goal is to do the components 100 per cent in-house in one year’s time.”

Rexhepi and his team of 20 turn out about 40 watches a year. He will embark on a new watch only if he can “bring something different” technically. And the watch has to be made the traditional way, by hand with decoration and hand-finishing.

In the Chronometre Contemporain, which took five years to develop, Rexhepi introduced a zero-reset mechanism that allows precise time setting, activated by simply pulling the crown to time-setting position.

The improved Chronometre Contemporain II unveiled recently looks like the original, but has an entirely new movement with an independently driven jumping-seconds function that leaves the movement’s precision unaffected.

The Chronometre Antimagnetique, an anti-magnetic timepiece made for the Only Watch charity auction, reflects Rexhepi’s strong loyalty to classical watchmaking.

Instead of using silicon, a highly magnetic-resistant new material, he stuck to the traditional Faraday cage to protect the movement from magnetism.

“(Silicon) is not interesting for me,” he says. “You can’t do bevelling, good finishing.”

But the trouble with the anti-magnetic cage is it blocks the movement from view; Rexhepi wants its beauty to be seen and appreciated.

His solution was to build a screw-down case-back that the owner can remove to reveal a second, see-through sapphire back underneath.

“We try to bring something interesting,” says Rexhepi, who spends 14 hours a day in his workshop, Monday to Saturday. “This is really my goal. My only dream is I hope I will leave something important.”

Rexhepi is not about to retire – he vows he never will – but already he’s thinking about his legacy.

He’s much inspired by his heroes, the 18th century French watchmaking inventor Abraham-Louis Breguet and the late English watchmaker George Daniel, deemed to be among the best in his lifetime.

“Breguet did many interesting things and Daniel many good things. This is what I hope in the future I will do,” says Rexhepi.

“I don’t think we’ll be able to do more than Breguet did… (but) you’ll never know.”