You would be forgiven for thinking you were at the bottom of a valley in the Jura mountains were it not for Mont Blanc and Le Môle framed by the windows of the De Witt watch workshops in the Genevan countryside. Watches that proudly bear the engraving “Manufacturée à Vandœuvres” and embody the pinnacle of the watchmaker's art, even achieving a world first, launched this year at Basel: a bracelet watch featuring a tourbillon, minute repeater, split-seconds chronograph with isolator and bi-retrograde perpetual calendar. A marvel.
Admittedly Jérôme de Witt, the CEO, has always been surrounded by the very best in horology. Despite his Dutch name, his father was a White Russian noble, a lover of fine watches, who fled Russia in 1919. He is related on his mother Princess Napoleon's side to all the European royal families and, above all, he is the fifth generation direct descendant of Jérôme Bonaparte, the Emperor's brother, whose passion for watches spawned an extraordinary collection. Jérôme de Witt has thus inherited a part of this collection, augmented over the centuries by its different owners.
This explains his connoisseurship and why it is impossible for him to sign his name to watches that are anything less than outstanding.
Jérôme de Witt, the director of the eponymic watches DR
Under the knowing gaze of Napoleon I
As a result, he has gathered together highly talented watchmakers and has provided them, at Vandœuvres, with a magnificent setting in workshops with waxed floors, larch panelling and doors that open onto the bucolic calm of an orchard and Mont Blanc. Here, machines of yesteryear combine harmoniously with high-tech electronics and state-of-the-art computers. A haven of peace conducive to the creation, each year, of 400 to 500 extraordinary watches. Especially since the centre of Geneva, with its luxury shops which set the fashion in watches, its cosmopolitan customers, and its melting pot of ideas, is two steps away.
Nor it seems has his ancestor Napoleon I been forgotten: his huge standing portrait by David (a reproduction of course) hangs imposingly in the workshop. His family, directly through his son Valéry Bollier-de Witt, who develops and manages the marketing side, or by extension through the watchmakers and the other associates, is essential to the CEO of de Witt watches. He cannot conceive of working anywhere but in this environment of trust and mutual respect on which the fortune of the Genevan cabinotiers of the 18th century was built. For him, this is the only way to achieve perfection because everyone shows constant and wholehearted commitment, personally signing every single movement that they work on.
Jean Dubrova, toolmaker and prototypist. DR
Almost everything is made on site
Highly skilled watchmakers who have received exclusive training at the schools of the most celebrated brands, divide their time between the Vandœuvres manufactury and the traditional workshop which Jérôme de Witt bought at La Chaux-de-Fonds and where some of his great watch complications are built.
The De Witt manufactory, on account of its size and its working method, evokes the golden age of Genevan horology, a time when the entire neighbourhood of Saint-Gervais swayed to the rhythm of hundreds of cabinotiers who produced these marvels of finesse and precision which were fought over by the Russians, Chinese, American pioneers and European kings who all dreamt of owning them. Practically everything is done on site, from the design to the case prototypes, from the size of the column wheels to the dials produced in a Genevan specialist workshop which Jérôme de Witt shares with two other prestigious brands. De Witt watches are in fact not only ultra-complicated but are also works of art with refined dials in shapes as sensual as they are rigorous. And when the mechanics are revealed, it is always with elegance and superb refinement. Simply so that its overall beauty can be shared rather than overlooked.
Nobility is not acquired but penetrates slowly, generation after generation. This is what De Witt watches forcefully and soberly remind us of.
