IF ONLY WALLS COULD SPEAK - Blancpain

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single watchmaker. The Le Brassus farmhouse
transports these methods—and the
philosophy behind them—forward to our
times. The basics remain fully intact. The
farmhouse is ill-suited to productions lines
with their output charts and is not outfitted
with any. Instead, each watchmaker is given
his or her traditional work bench and gives
birth to time pieces, as was done 200 years
ago, building each from “A to Z”, that is to
say that a single watchmaker creates each
watch working from beginning to end.
During the ceremonies marking the reopening
of the Le Brassus farmhouse,
Blancpain’s CEO Marc A. Hayek explained that
Blancpain had many choices as it confronted
the problem of how to expand its capacity.
The easy path, conventional wisdom, if you
will, was to select a location for an efficient,
modern watchmaking factory. Plan-les-Ouates
in Geneva is a veritable garden blooming with
shining edifices housing famous brands popping
up like so many tulips in asphalt beds.
That solution, however, conflicted with
Blancpain’s traditional method ethos. The
Jura mountains, in which Vallée de Joux
lies, has been inextricably woven into the
fabric of Blancpain and linked to its soul
throughout its history. Moving from Le
Brassus was out of the question. Instead,
Blancpain chose to restore meticulously the
farmhouse that has become its symbol.
Leaving the four exterior walls intact and
cleverly adjusting the interior spaces,
Blancpain was able, settle on a design that
would on the one hand save the building
and on the other increase the watch,
making space by 50%.
As with any renovation, the first phase—
destruction—always precedes construction.
A stout constitution was required when
surveying the end result of the destruction
phase. Management and watchmakers
alike could only exhale as they peered into
the dusty pit that had once been the most
prized workshop of Blancpain, trusting that
the rewards would arrive at the other end.