Newsweek: The Finer Things

NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

Why does a watchmaker spend weeks manipulating strands of gold mesh into a single watch chain, when the process could be done simply and more cheaply by a machine? Why would a rug producer forego the cost-efficient, machine-aided production used almost universally? In a technological age, what’s the point? 

In a word: timelessness. 

Despite the ease of high-tech production processes, many of the world’s finest products are still made by hand, mostly by anonymous artisans, using methods often perfected generations ago. From watches to pens to Oriental rugs, many of the world’s classic luxury items are created with time-honored techniques.

Classic Timepieces

“Classic watches are never in high fashion yet they never go out of style,” notes Christopher Murphy, luxury watch buyer for Harrods in London. “They are discreet pieces you can wear with either a smart suit or jeans.” 

The wristwatch debuted about 150 years ago, and quickly became indispensable for the style-conscious. While surveying the Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851, Queen Victoria stopped to admire the new Patek Philippe timepieces. Many years later, the reigning monarch of science – Albert Einstein — commissioned from the Geneva-based firm a watch with large Roman numerals to accommodate his nearsightedness. 

Today, watches by Cartier, Audemars Piguet and others often emulate designs from the 1920s and ’30s, when art deco reigned. The best combine state-of-the-art precision with painstaking craft, with a few containing more than 300 moving parts. Barely altered since the days of Queen Victoria, Patek Philippe’s watchmaking process combines the advantages of design by numerous engineers, with the skill and tradition of master craftsmen who hand-polish and finish each tiny component. Years of training and experience enable these experts to hear whether polish has been applied to a rod so small it is invisible to the naked eye and to position intricate parts such as the spring coil, whose average thickness is four to five times thinner than a human hair.

Exterior decoration is no less precise. The chainsmith uses only his hands and a pair of pliers to weave from scratch an exquisite watch bracelet one owner described as being “fluid as mercury.” For specially commissioned watch faces, world-renowned enameler Suzanne Rohr paints miniatures on a two-inch-diameter gold surface. Her brush contains a single strand. The 100 hues she employs are laid down in tiny dots and fired successively to harden. Because it takes up to 20 firings to harden the enamel, a single-degree variance can ruin her work, which typically requires a minimum of four months per piece, working four to six hours a day. 

Patek Philippe makes no more than 20,000 watches each year. Experts liken this to a limited edition, since even the firm’s most popular models number only a few hundred pieces a year. The company tracks which artisans fabricate an individual watch, where it was sold, and often who purchased it. Watches that contain simpler movements, such as the 18-karat gold Patek Philippe Calatrava (the firm’s top-selling men’s strap watch, introduced more than 60 years ago), go for $9-10,000. For watches that have more complicated movements, such as automatic adjustments for leap years or months of 30 or 31 days, prices begin at $43,000. “Classic design appeals to those who’ll not only wear a timepiece for a lifetime but also pass it on to their children,” notes Geneva-based Philippe Stern, president of Patek Philippe. Patek Philippe’s new workshops group all their watchmaking activities under one roof for the first time, providing an ideal way to maximize productivity; visitors can tour this site, which showcases the company’s traditional and cutting-edge technology. 

Power of the Pen

The Latin word stylus, meaning “writing instrument,” is also the basis for the English “style.” Evocative without being ostentatious, fountain pens are experiencing a style renaissance. “Communicating has become so impersonal it has magnified the impact of words signed by a fountain pen,” says Zurich-based collector John Hurst, head of Hurst & Freelancers, a translation and communications firm. “When you use a fountain pen, there’s a very real, tactile appreciation of the nib floating on liquid ink.” 

One of the most delicate parts of creating a pen lies in making the nibs. At Parker, the nib of the Duofold Red Jasper is crafted in 18-karat gold with a platinum highlight. Craftsmen undergo several months of training before creating nibs used in actual production. After machine-aided processes strip the flat nib from a solid gold strip and form its curved shape, a welder adds a metal pellet to the nib point. Then a skilled worker slits the nib using a wheel that’s a skinny 0.005 inch thick. The entire pen-making process takes two weeks. 

Lying in State

While the fineness of the wool and number of knots are the usual indicators of quality in a handmade Oriental rug, often overlooked is the incredible skill underlying the rug-making process. “The demise of 20th-century handwoven Oriental carpets bears directly on producers’ and importers’ giving up on the old ways,” says George Jevremovic, Philadelphia-based president of Woven

Legends, an internationally recognized producer of handmade Turkish rugs. 

The rug-making process starts with shearing nomadic sheep, followed by scouring and hand-combing the raw wool, spinning it into yarn, blending indigenous wools and dyeing them. While virtually all “handmade” carpets these days involve machines at one or another stage of production, some companies do eschew them. Woven Legends, for example, has persuaded many Turkish artisans to return to their ancestral methods. 

“Many hours and many hands,” according to Jevremovic, are involved in creating a palette of natural dyes, from plants such as indigo, chamomile and pomegranate. Azeri folk-life rugs, made by tribal and village weavers of Turkey’s eastern Anatolia, cost $70 to $100 per square foot and are considered folk art. “If it were possible to condense into one-person time, making a single 9 foot by 12 foot Azeri carpet would take 14 months,” Jevremovic estimates. The rug owner appreciates the painstaking procedures, he adds. “The discriminating buyer looks beyond trends to the bigger picture. This is timeless art created by many.” 

Stuart Wade co-publishes The Switzerland Advisor, an on-line travel publication. 

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