MB&F builds machines; Gabriel Colliard paints with fire. Their meeting, announced this week, turns the Legacy Machine 101 into a trilogy of miniature jungles rendered in cloisonné enamel — a blue-dominated scene with a monkey, a red one with a macaw, a green one with a crocodile — each limited to eight pieces in platinum, each dial the product of roughly a month at the kiln. The full series of twenty-four watches will take more than two years to complete, which may be the most honest production schedule in modern watchmaking.
Cloisonné is demanding enough on a flat dial. On the LM101 it borders on the perverse: the dial plate had to be thinned to accept the enamel’s layered construction, and the familiar floating sub-dials gave way to longer hands sweeping directly over Colliard’s landscapes — hours and minutes at two o’clock, power reserve at six — all beneath the collection’s signature suspended 14mm balance wheel, beating slowly at the heart of the scene like something alive in the canopy. Colliard, who was given carte blanche for the compositions, likes to say that “the fire always has the final say”; every firing can swallow a week’s work.
The machine beneath is pure MB&F: the hand-wound in-house calibre with its Straumann double hairspring, 231 components, finishing specified under the eye of Kari Voutilainen, and a power reserve now stretched to 60 hours. Even the ratchet wheel on the movement side carries its own cloisonné enamel — a hidden second painting for the owner alone. At CHF 98,000 (US$131,000) before tax, the trilogy sits where MB&F has always lived, at the junction of horology and art. The jungle, for once, fits in a 40mm case.
