Founded because the watches we wanted did not exist.
Henrik Lumiere established the atelier in Geneva in 1987 with one intention: to make watches that answered specific mechanical questions rather than commercial ones. The first piece took three years to complete. It was a tourbillon without a balance spring, regulated by a barometric compensator of his own design. It kept time to within four seconds per day.
The second piece took eighteen months. The third took fourteen. By 1994, the atelier could complete a piece in eleven months. This has not changed. Eleven months is not a constraint; it is the correct amount of time to build a watch properly.
Today the atelier employs six watchmakers. Three trained here from apprenticeship. All six could, if necessary, complete any piece in the collection from bare metal to finished movement. This is not efficiency; it is continuity. A Luminate watch must remain serviceable for two hundred years.
On the question of why we make each component ourselves.
The answer is not principled. It is practical. A component made to someone else's tolerance is a component made to someone else's standard. We have specific requirements for hardness, surface finish, and dimensional accuracy that exceed what we can reliably specify in a purchase order.
The mainspring of the Calibre I is made from a strip of Nivarox 1 alloy, hardened, tempered, and surface-finished in-house. The process generates a spring with a yield strength of 1,900 N/mm2 and a surface Ra of 0.05 microns. We have tried to source equivalent springs externally. We have not succeeded.
This is not a marketing claim. It is the reason we make thirty watches per year and not three hundred.
"A watch is the only object a person carries that is expected to work correctly every second of every hour of every day for a century without failure. This expectation is not unreasonable. It is the specification."
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