Krayon’s stunning artisanal complication, the Anywhere Métiers d’Art Azur, is cased in platinum, and indicates hours and minutes via two hands in the center of a dial that appears to be suspended in the center of the watch.
The Krayon Anywhere Métiers d’Art Azur
The time display is surrounded by a sun-icon solar display that indicates the time over 24 hours. The ring-shaped display is divided into the diurnal sector (sky blue) and a nocturnal sector (midnight blue). These displays indicate the sunrise and sunset times, a read on the inner bezel.
The date and month are seen on a subsidiary dial at 6 o’clock.
The new watch echoes the Swiss independent watchmaker’s superb Krayon Anywhere Edition Only Watch 2021. The exceptional dial is created by an enamelist who has deposited, by hand, a dot of lacquer until the desired blue color obtained, producing a truly unparalleled result.
Krayon explains that as a double calendar, for which all months last 31 days, the watch requires only five annual adjustments, easily and quickly made using the crown in both directions.
Krayon has equipped the Anywhere Métiers d’Art Azur with the in-house Caliber C030, entirely assembled by Rémi Maillat, Krayon’s founder and master watchmaker.
The manual-wind 39mm by 9.5mm watch offers an impressive eighty-six hours of power reserve. A limited edition of fifteen, it offers the purchaser the opportunity to set the watch to the city or location of his or her choice for the indication of sunrise and sunset.
With Anywhere, the second debut from independent Swiss watchmaker Krayon, the wearer can see sunset and sunrise times for any single location indicated on the dial.
The watch, with its all-new C030 manual-wind caliber, streamlines the functions of the earlier Krayon Everywhere, on which (you guessed it) the wearer can see sunset and sunrise times across the globe. That watch was awarded the Innovation Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) in 2018.
The back of the Krayon Anywhere, showing Manual-winding Cal. C030. The bridge edges echo the shape of one of the rivers that empties into Lake Neuchâtel.
Like the dial, the back of the newer celestial complication is also less encumbered, with large, expertly polished plates that hide the gears below. Watch engineer Rémi Maillat, who worked on so many of Cartier’s superb, complicated calibers prior to founding Krayon in 2017, places the hours, minutes and seconds beneath this larger plate.
A portion of the sunset and sunrise complication dominates the lower section of the movement. Framing a threaded and adjustable transverse screw is a dramatic two-level cam that rotates, pushing two racks to continuously transmit the information required to activate the dial’s sunset and sunrise displays.
Krayon will adjust two screws (visible within a set of rubies at each side of the visible cam) to account for longitudinal differences in sunset and sunrise.
The cam, which the watchmaker can customize according to the owner’s chosen latitude, rotates fully once each year. Krayon will adjust two screws (visible within a set of rubies at each side of the cam) to account for longitudinal differences in sunset (left side) and sunrise (right side).
PERSONAL DÉCOR
A close-up of the back of the Krayon Anywhere, showing the movement’s expert hand-polished beveling.
Maillat’s wavy bridge décor is not simply eye-catching. It’s also personal. The manually beveled edges of the larger bridge echo the shape of one of the rivers that empties into Lake Neuchâtel, near Maillat’s home in Switzerland. The bridge’s waves trace the position of the watch’s cam during a Neuchâtel sunset, according to Krayon. All the bridges, and even the cam, feature perfectly mirror-polished anglage.
Thanks to a thin (5mm) movement, Krayon has managed to maintain a 9mm thick case for the Anywhere despite all this complexity. And at only 39mm in diameter the Krayon Anywhere may be among the smaller high-end designs offering a sunrise/sunset display. And with the obvious attention paid to its back view, it is certainly among the most beautiful.
The dial side of the Krayon Anywhere in rose gold.
The Essentials
Movement: Manual-winding Cal. C030 showing (on dial) hours and minutes, sunrise and sunset times, 24-hour display, simple calendar, month. Wave-décor on bridges with hand-polished beveling throughout. and Power reserve is 86 hours, 3 Hz frequency, 55 jewels,432 components.
Case: 39mm by 9.5mm white gold or rose gold with alligator strap and matching gold buckle. Price: 116,000 Swiss Francs (about $127,000)
This article first appears in the Fall 2020 edition of International Watch.
The date and month are seen on a subsidiary dial at 6 o’clock.
