Every December 2nd, Parmigiani Fleurier celebrates its founder’s birthday not with words, but with creation. For Michel Parmigiani, time has never been a unit of measure, but a living matter, sculpted through harmony, proportion, and patience.
This year, to honour his 75th birthday, the Maison unveils La Ravenale: a singular Objet d’Art where restoration, artistic craft, and mechanical purity converge.
This unique pocket watch is conceived as a dialogue between nature’s geometry and the highest expressions of horological savoir-faire. At its core lies a restored minute repeater calibre from the 1920s, a mechanical voice reborn through the Maison’s mastery of restoration.
A TRIBUTE TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF NATURE
The name derives from the Ravenala madagascariensis – Madagascar’s Traveller’s Palm – whose perfect fan symmetry follows the laws of the Golden Ratio and whose trunk gathers water to sustain wanderers in distant landscapes.
To Michel Parmigiani, these natural forms reveal an underlying order. This spirit informs the engraving that animates the case, dial, and bridges, as well as the opal-and-jade marquetry adorning the caseback, a composition that balances reflection and stillness, sky and earth.
The Lépine pocket-watch format, featuring a thinner, bridgeless movement, amplifies this artistic vocabulary. Its generous architecture offers clarity and space, allowing métiers d’art to unfold with full expressive depth: engraving, marquetry, and stonework breathing across surfaces shaped specifically for them.
THE VOICE OF A REBORN MINUTE REPEATER
More than a visual creation, La Ravenale is a timepiece that speaks. Its minute repeater – restored from a historical Ed. Koehn calibre – conveys time through sound, the most intimate form of mechanical expression. On demand, the watch strikes the hours, quarters, and minutes on two distinct tones: a low note for the hours, a high note for the minutes, and a blend of both for the quarters. Two precisely tuned gongs give the timepiece its acoustic identity, carefully refined to regain the clarity and balance of its original voice.
The Lépine construction naturally favours this sonic presence: the open internal architecture allows the chiming mechanism to resonate with greater purity, an essential characteristic for
a repeater.
For Michel Parmigiani, mechanical musicality embodies the soul of horology. Reviving a century-old chiming calibre restores not only its function, but the emotion it once carried.
PERPETUATING THROUGH RESTORATION
At the heart of La Ravenale is a historical chiming calibre from the workshops of Ed. Koehn, one of Geneva’s most discreet but esteemed maisons.
The ultra-thin movement – with central hours, minutes, and small seconds at 6 o’clock – has been revived through a process where time itself becomes material. Its bridges, engraved with palm-inspired motifs, unite mechanical structure with natural geometry, turning precision into ornament.
Michel Parmigiani’s private reserve of antique movements, nearly thirty calibres gathered over decades, is the source of this mechanism. Each was safeguarded for the day it couldreturn to life; La Ravenale fulfils that long-held intention.
Restoration required intuition, patience, and an uncompromising respect for authenticity. With no spare components available, every original part was preserved. Jewels friction-set into the bridges and mainplate remain in place during engraving; anglage and découvertes are finished with traditional wooden- peg tools; historical calibration-marks were re-established by hand, renewing a dialogue that began a century ago.
The repeater mechanism remains discreetly integrated. Nothing on the dial reveals its presence; the slide activating the chiming sequence blends seamlessly into the case architecture. When engaged, the watch alternates low, high, and combined tones to express the hours, minutes, and quarters, respectively. Sound transmission has been carefully rebalanced, and the Lépineconstruction enhances resonance by opening the internal volume and allowing vibrations to unfold with clarity.
THE DIALOGUE OF MATTER: OPAL AND JADE
The white-gold case reveals a double back adorned with opal-and- jade marquetry. Opal, delicate and ever-changing, demands exceptional precision as each fragment is cut, shaped, and polished individually. Jade provides a quiet counterpart, diffusing rather than reflecting light.
The dial displays a deep blue achieved through a calibrated PVD treatment, depositing an ultra-thin layer of colour in a vacuum to create exceptional chromatic depth, a contemporary gesture within an object shaped by ancestral craft.
Together, jade from Guatemala, milky opal from Turkey, and blue opal from Australia form a composition of balanced contrasts, a serene interplay between shifting and stable matter.
THE GOLDEN HANDS BEHIND LA RAVENALE
A constellation of Mains d’Or surrounds this Objet d’Art — the Maîtres Artisans who translate Parmigiani Fleurier’s ideals into form. Their work spans engraved bridges, sculpted gold, stone marquetry, and a hand-forged chain requiring nearly one hundred hours to complete.
Among them, the engraving was entrusted to Atelier Blandenier, one of Switzerland’s rare ateliers dedicated exclusively to traditional hand-engraving for haute horlogerie, a discipline that extends to the movement’s decoration. The chain, created by Laurent Jolliet, Switzerland’s last master chain-maker, is entirely fashioned in 18-carat white gold. Its hexagonal links mirror the geometry of the bail, while the oval links recall the elliptical purity of the PF emblem.
La Ravenale reflects the discipline and grace that have defined Michel Parmigiani’s journey, a creation where time, craft, and proportion converge.
TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS
DIAL
Material: 18ct white gold treated in blue
Finishing: Hand-engraved and grained
Square hour markers, PF logo applique, and subdial frames in 18ct white gold
CASE
Hand-engraved and polished according to the La Ravenale theme
18ct white gold PD150
Lépine pocket watch style
Diameter: 51.8 mm
Thickness: 13.1 mm
Crown: Ø 8.00 mm, set with a blue sapphire
Crystals: Domed anti-reflective sapphire
Caseback: Polished and domed, inlaid with opal and jade marquetry
Water resistance: Dust-resistant
FUNCTIONS
Hours, minutes, small seconds, minute repeater
HANDS
Hours and minutes: 18ct white gold, openworked Delta shape
Seconds: 18ct white gold, baton-shaped
CHAIN
18ct white gold, entirely handmade
Alternating oval and hexagonal links, beveled and polished
One oval link engraved with PF logo
Length: 32 cm
MOVEMENT
Original movement manufactured by Koehn A GENEVE, numbered 78708
Manual winding
Swiss anchor escapement
Minute repeater chiming on two gongs
Symmetrical hammers
Hanging barrel with Maltese cross stopwork
Split bimetallic balance with steel hairspring
Jewels: 27
Diameter: 38.25 mm
Thickness: 6.8 mm
Decoration: Bridges and mainplate beveled and hand-engraved
A MASTERPIECE IN THE MAKING
Behind La Ravenale stand the Masters, the Golden Hands, chain-maker, engravers, lapidaries, and restorers who transform Michel Parmigiani’s vision into living matter.
THE OPAL AND JADE MARQUETRY
On the reverse of La Ravenale, the double back reveals a marquetry of two stones that have never before shared the same watch: opal and jade.
This exceptional composition was realised by Maîtres Artisans whose refined handling of precious-stone marquetry bridges the worlds of horology and art. Their work transforms the caseback into a true tableau — a mineral landscape where light, colour, and matter converse in silence.
Each stone was chosen not only for its beauty, but for its symbolic resonance — one mutable, the other immutable.
Opal, with its iridescent spectrum, mirrors the changing skies and waters of a journey. Its fire dances beneath the surface like captured light, a reminder of movement and impermanence. Working opal demands extreme delicacy; the slightest excess of pressure and it fractures. Each fragment must be individually cut, shaped, and polished before being set into the white- gold base — a process closer to micromosaic than to lapidary art.
Jade, conversely, anchors the composition. Dense, serene, and revered in ancient cultures for its link to wisdom and balance, it offers visual stillness. When polished, its surface diffuses light rather than reflecting it — giving depth rather than brilliance.
Together, opal and jade create a mineral dialogue — between the ephemeral and the eternal, translucence and opacity, vibration and calm.
This union of opposites embodies the spirit of La Ravenale: a harmony born from contrast, conceived as nature conceives her own perfections.
THE MOVEMENT A MASTERPIECE SIGNED ED. KOEHN
At the heart of La Ravenale beats a movement of exceptional lineage. Signed Ed. Koehn, Genève, it dates from the 1920s — an age when horology reached ist most refined expression of precision and grace.
Edouard Koehn, once Technical Director at Patek Philippe before founding his own manufacture, embodied the Genevan ideal of discreet mastery. His calibres were celebrated for their slender architecture, their acoustic purity, and the harmony of their mechanical layouts. He sought not complication for its own sake, but proportion and equilibrium — a philosophy that resonates deeply with the values of Parmigiani Fleurier.
The calibre within La Ravenale is an ultra-thin minute repeater, with central hours and minutes and a small seconds at 6 o’clock. Restored entirely by the Maison’s Atelier de Restauration, it now sings again with crystalline resonance — its chime clear, balanced, and musical.
The bridges on the visible side have been engraved by hand with the palm motif, echoing the theme of the piece and linking mechanical construction to organic geometry. Two additional bridges, hidden beneath the dial, are engraved in the same spirit — a gesture invisible
to the eye yet essential to the integrity of the work.
The main plate was also restored and finely chiselled by hand between the bridges on the movement’s verso. Each bevel has been manually retouched, and the anglages delicately softened by hand. Around the jewels and screws, the découvertes — those minute openings that let light reveal the depth of the mechanism — were cut and finished in wood, using a traditional engraving technique that demands infinite patience.
On the dial side, the surface was carefully refinished and cleaned, its outer edge treated by hand-applied circling(cerclage à la main). Along this perimeter, fine minute-checking marks used by the watchmaker to verify the repeater’s precision were meticulously re- engraved by hand — subtle traces of human mastery, perpetuating the dialogue between the restorer and the original craftsman.
Each component, from the hanging barrel with its Maltese-cross stop-work to the symmetrical hammers and split bimetallic balance, bears the imprint of Genevan excellence. Nothing is superfluous, nothing is left to chance: every curve, every sound, every reflection serves the pursuit of harmony.
THE ENGRAVERS, THE ART OF LIGHT IN METAL
The engraving of La Ravenale was entrusted to the artisans of Atelier Blandenier, in Neuchâtel — one of Switzerland’s last ateliers dedicated to the ancestral craft of hand-engraving for haute horlogerie.
Their work extends from the bridges of the restored movement to the dial and the white-gold case itself. Under the microscope, every line becomes a sculpture of light: traced by a burin guided only by the artisan’s breath, rhythm, and intuition.
The motif, inspired by the geometry of the Traveller’s Palm, is not decorative in the usual sense. It translates the veins of the palm leaf into a pattern of equilibrium — a visual metaphor for the Golden Ratio that Michel Parmigiani considered the divine measure of beauty.
Each engraving is a micro-architecture, where depth is counted in microns, yet emotion resonates far beyond the surface.
THE CHAIN BY LAURENT JOLLIET, MASTER CHAIN-MAKER
The chain of La Ravenale is not a simple accessory — it is the expression of a discipline that stands on the edge of extinction, brought to life by the hands of Laurent Jolliet, the last master chain-maker of Switzerland.
Forged entirely in 18-carat white gold, weighing 36.5 grams and measuring 31.5 cm, this chain embodies one of the most demanding crafts of traditional horology. From raw metal wire to the final articulated links, every stage is executed by hand — drawn, shaped, bent, soldered and polished with tools that have changed little in a century.
Historically, pocket-watch chains were both guardians and statements. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gentlemen wore them not only to secure their timepieces but to display refinement through the artistry of the chain itself. Whether simple curb links or elaborate “Albert” chains adorned with seals and medallions, they expressed status, taste, and the intimate relationship between owner and object.
In La Ravenale, this heritage is reinterpreted with architectural precision.
The hexagonal links are inspired by the shape of the bail of the pocket watch, their mirrored symmetry creating a perfectly elongated form. Alternating with oval links that recall the elliptical geometry of the PF logo, the composition achieves both balance and rhythm, an echo of Michel Parmigiani’s devotion to proportion.
Each of the approximately 100 hours of work required to complete the chain is guided by instinct as much as by measurement. Every bevel, every joint, every polished facet reflects the dialogue between metal and hand, between structure and grace.
The PF-engraved link and the seamless articulation of ist form testify to an art that resists industrial repetition. In La Ravenale, the chain is far more than a functional link, it is a gesture of continuity, joining the case to the hand, the hand to the artisan, and the artisan to time itself.
