Anouk Reinhardt keeps two workbenches in her studio above a bakery in Le Sentier. One is a traditional watchmaker's bench, raised to chest height, its surface covered with tweezers, oilers and the small glass domes that protect half-assembled movements from dust. The other holds a laptop, a soldering station and a tangle of debugging cables. She moves between them several times an hour, and says the switch no longer feels strange. Both, she insists, are ways of persuading small things to keep time.
Reinhardt spent eleven years at a respected independent manufacture in the valley, rising to finish the hairsprings on its most complicated pieces. She left, to the bafflement of former colleagues, after buying her first fitness tracker and finding it both useful and hideous. The device knew a great deal about her body, she recalls, and nothing whatsoever about beauty. She began sketching an alternative that same evening, on the back of a train ticket.
The result, released last spring under her small label Studio Balancier, is a watch that refuses to choose sides. At its centre sits a hand-wound mechanical movement, visible through a sapphire caseback, beating at a stately three hertz. Above the dial floats a thin monochrome display that remains entirely dark unless you turn your wrist twice in quick succession. Then it offers a single line of information, a message or a heart rate, before fading away again.
Code as complication
In watchmaking, any function beyond the telling of hours and minutes is called a complication. Reinhardt treats her firmware in exactly the same way. Every feature must justify its place, and most proposals are rejected. The software, which she wrote largely herself over two winters, runs to barely a few thousand lines. There are no apps, no buzzing alerts, no stream of badges and streaks. The watch will tell you one thing, and only when asked.
A mechanical watch is patient. It does not demand anything from you. I wanted the digital part to learn that patience. — Anouk Reinhardt
That discipline has won her an unusual following. Collectors who would never wear a conventional smartwatch have queued for the Balancier 01, and so have a surprising number of software engineers, who seem to regard its restraint as a gentle rebuke to their own industry. Production is limited to three hundred pieces a year, each assembled and regulated by Reinhardt and two apprentices, and the waiting list now runs to eighteen months.
The purists are not entirely won over. A few old colleagues still refer to the watch, affectionately, as the gadget. Reinhardt shrugs this off. The valley has absorbed disruption before, she points out, most famously when quartz arrived and nearly erased the craft altogether. Her ambition is gentler than a revolution. She simply wants to prove that the two traditions, mechanical and digital, can share a case without one diminishing the other.
Before I left, she let me wind the prototype she wears herself. The crown turned with a soft, granular resistance, the kind of sensation no touchscreen has ever quite replicated. Then she lifted my wrist, turned it twice, and the display woke to show a single word she had programmed that morning for visitors. It read, simply, welcome. A moment later it was gone, and only the ticking remained.
