We arrive at Neuchâtel just as the sun begins to break through the clouds, bathing the rolling Swiss mountains in gold and turning the lake into a glittering pool. Krayon’s workshop is located just a stone’s throw from the waterfront, in a beautiful heritage building with a very traditional façade.

After being buzzed in, we catch our first glimpse of Rémi Maillat at the bottom of an imposing spiral staircase as he waves at us from the very top. Once we make our way up, he shows us into the workshop, and the youthful yet soft-spoken energy he conveys as we exchange greetings is fitting for the work that Krayon does – modern watches that are imaginative and original, yet underpinned by highly technical, practical complications.

Founded in 2013, Krayon became known for their focus on celestial timekeeping when they released their first watch in 2017, introducing an unusually artistic and almost poetic approach to watchmaking. Most of the work on their timepieces takes place in their Neuchâtel workshop, with one watchmaker being responsible for a watch as it passes through different stages of production.

Walking through the long, airy hallway with parquet flooring, the workshop is methodically arranged by room, then opens up into a beautiful meeting room with ceiling moldings, an imposing fireplace, and two balconies facing Lake Neuchâtel. The journey that Maillat has taken to get here is perhaps more unusual compared to other independent watchmakers, although when Krayon’s first watch, the Everywhere, was released, it was to great acclaim, introducing a highly complex mechanism that allowed the watch to calculate sunrise and sunset times anywhere on the globe, and winning the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) Innovation Prize in 2018. Such a serious timepiece played a big part in demonstrating Krayon’s mettle as serious watchmakers, a fact evident in their rapidly expanding team and beautiful premises.

Maillat’s background is in engineering, although his family had ties to watchmaking. “My father was in the watch industry and my mother taught mathematics,” he says. “Then I went on to study microtechnology engineering in Le Locle, where I discovered watchmaking for myself. What I love is that it combines mathematics [and] engineering but also is more artistic, such as on the decoration side, which is a mix of art and technique. I wanted to find my own specialty within this world.”

This spark of interest led him deeper into the world of watchmaking. After completing his studies, Maillat went on to do an internship at Vaucher Manufacture Fleurier, then began his career at Cartier in 2008 as a movement design engineer. His work at Cartier included some of their most complicated movements as part of their Fine Watchmaking collection, with his role expanding to include movement construction and project management.

“At the time, my dream was to become independent in my work – to have my own company and to work as a consultant for different companies as an engineer. In the beginning, we worked for companies such as Richemont and others, and this taught us how to organise our workshop. We would develop and make prototypes for adjustment. Later on, we began to have our own ideas for development, and we started to work on these so we could patent each idea and then discuss with the companies to produce it. But when we developed a solution for the mechanism that would later become the Everywhere, I decided not to sell the idea, but instead make my own watch with it.”

Of course, this transition also brought a very steep learning curve. The transition from working at a bigger company to going solo meant the difference between working in a very specific area to suddenly having to master all parts of the watch as well as manage a business. Maillat says, “At first, you feel limited because you’re not a designer and don’t have experience in that area. But slowly your approach begins to open up when you start working with different people. With Krayon, we had to learn everything from scratch – all aspects of the process from the ground up.”

This methodical approach is mirrored in the way their workshop is organised today. As Maillat takes us through the workshop, we enter the first room, which is entirely dedicated to decoration. There is a quiet hum of focus and watchmakers working away at their machines. In this room, work is done at the microscopic level – microscopes are placed at nearly every workstation. As Maillat explains, this is where most of the finishing occurs, and a large television is placed on one wall of the room which demonstrates a blown-up feed of a watchmaker working on a movement. This is mostly for practical reasons, to teach new watchmakers and provide a larger view of the components.

The second room is focused on logistics and quality control – the organisation of components in countless individual boxes, which are in turn nestled into a series of drawers, and desks where watchmakers can check and test each watch. At this point of the tour, Maillat’s cheerful young daughter joins us, holding on to his hand as he patiently talks us through the space. We learn that she has a keen interest in her father’s work too, and it’s not far out of the realm of possibility that watchmaking may run in the family!

Finally, the third and last workroom is the main part of the workshop, filled with traditional benches focused on preassembly and final control of the timepiece, among other important work. There’s a nice sense of camaraderie as Maillat is pulled away at certain junctures when there are questions, or to discuss something relating to one of the watches.

The physical setup of Krayon’s workshop not only mirrors the watchmaker’s journey as they make one of Krayon’s watches, but is complemented by Maillat’s ideation and development process, which is about translating the nebulous into ordered steps, as with the creation of their first watch, the Everywhere. But as we move into the office, we get more of a glimpse of the creative mind behind the watches. Maillat’s office is filled with art and watch reference books, paintings, and his large table is scattered with work at various stages, burgeoning with possibility.

“It took about five years – possibly more – to conceive, develop, and make the Everywhere. I had the idea a few years before, but in the beginning we thought it was impossible,” Maillat says. But when they decided to make this a watch under their own name, the design and the mechanics went hand in hand.

“When we started working on the watch, it [started] from what [we wanted] to show,” Maillat says. “Then you think about what space the mechanics needs, how you organise it, then how you achieve it. It’s not black and white when you conceive something, and it is a lot of compromise. When you have an idea, you already have the shape of it, then you try to understand how to make it.”

The process Maillat describes feels like an organic, natural process, which further ties into their strong connection with nature, art, and the city they are based in. For example, with their Métiers d’Art Arborea piece, their interpretation of Henri Rousseau’s Virgin Forest With Sunset, heightens a dense jungle scene by transforming it into an abstract mosaic in keeping with their style. This approach is shared across their Métiers d’Art watches, adapting beloved pieces of art on to their dials. As Maillat tells us, some of the inspiration for their watches comes from visiting museums, exhibitions, and more. The art they consume is eventually translated into colour schemes and designs.

But achieving their vision – creating art that exists at the intersection of nature and mechanics – brings its own challenges. One of Krayon’s signature concepts is the shape of their bridges and the finishing found across their movements, seen most clearly on the Anywhere examples. The overall shape of the bridges is based on Lake Neuchâtel, while the unusual curvature of the Côtes de Genève is a physical expression of recorded sunset time data over an entire year.

“If something goes wrong at any step then all the bridges could be ruined,” Maillat says. “Because the shape and design go across the bridges as a whole, if one of them is wrong, that means all the others are unusable.”

He shows us a container of movements that for one reason or other are deemed to not meet quality standards – some with defects that are barely noticeable, but not considered perfect enough to be put in a Krayon watch. These stringent quality-control efforts are crucial in order to convey the best standards of art that the brand works towards.

Movement aside, the dials, especially on their Métiers d’Art pieces – such as the Only Watch submissions and other unique pieces – can be tricky to create and achieve exactly what they envision. Taking us through the process of creating the Anywhere Aurora and the Anywhere Métiers d’Art Azur, Maillat explains the trial-and-error process taken to achieve the exact shade of greenish-blue on the Aurora that morphs under the light, to the difficulty of ensuring an even gradient with the dye on the limited-edition Azur, because of the way the dye dries darker than its original shade.

Stepping outside the workshop for some fresh air and lunch, we walk through Neuchâtel Castle and the town, where Maillat’s knowledge of the surrounding buildings is impressive in terms of history and architecture, his attention to detail when it comes to place as evident as it is in his work.

Krayon’s desire extends beyond creating something that is beautiful, but seeks to ensure that their watches are grounded in the practical. Over lunch, Maillat tells us about travelling to meet collectors and shares how they gathered user feedback for their first watch, the Everywhere. “We realised that the movement was too complex – to create, to service and for the wearer to use. So we took that information and created the Anywhere, which only requires a watchmaker’s adjustment to change the location.”

Naturally, the nature of the Everywhere and Anywhere pieces requires a measure of conversation between the brand and the collector when it comes to setting a location for the watch. “The most interesting place we had to set one of our watches to was when a collector requested it to be set to Point Nemo,” Maillat says. “The closest place to that point is actually the International Space Station. It’s always interesting to see the places that are important to our clients.”

We end the day with a walk down to the lake that inspires their bridges, discussing the future of the workshop and what is yet to come. If we freeze this moment in time, it’s a rare opportunity to catch a rapidly expanding and growing workshop as it goes from strength to strength. Krayon’s work is refreshingly modern, exploring the boundaries of what is possible in the world of mechanical watchmaking, while retaining a strong sense of their identity and a connection to the world around them, expressed through history and art.

When asked what his ideal or dream watch to make might be, without any restrictions, Maillat laughs and just shrugs. He doesn’t have an answer to that. “Anything is possible,” he says. “Even if not now, maybe in the future.”