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.
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.
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.
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 could
return 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 Lépine construction enhances resonance by opening the internal volume and allowing vibrations to unfold with clarity.
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.
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.
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