Bovet is a very unusual watchmaker. A historical Swiss maison founded in 1822, today it is a small but remarkably capable manufacture, employing some 70 artisans and making only about 1,000 watches per year. With an unusual style, be it ornate, Baroque-inspired pieces, collaborations with Pininfarina, or dials made out of sugar crystals, the brand is decidedly out of the mainstream. But the quality of its artisanal approach and mechanical aptitude was never in doubt, and this was made especially clear with its latest win at the 2024 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG awards).
The Bovet Récital 28 Prowess 1, a world timer with a never-before-seen mechanism, took home the Mechanical Exception prize. In addition to a flying tourbillon and perpetual calendar, its hand-wound movement features a series of 24 rollers with four sides to them; each side bears the name of a city. The four sides each correspond to one configuration of daylight saving time (DST) that is used throughout the world—UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), when no-one is using DST during the winter months; EAS (Europe and America Summer Time), during summer when all countries using DST have implemented it; and AST (American Summer Time) and EWT (European Winter Time), to accommodate the fact that North America and Europe do not switch over on the same dates each year. The configuration of the rollers is controlled by pushing on the crown. As such, the Prowess 1 solves an age-old problem for the world timer—it is the only watch of its type that can be said to be truly correct for all hourly time zone offsets at any time of the year.
The driving force behind Bovet is its owner, Pascal Raffy (pictured above). An established collector of fine timepieces, he was both familiar with and an admirer of historical Bovet pocket watches. He acquired the brand in 2001. In preparing himself for the leadership role, he was definitive about one thing—to focus on quality, and not quantity. “I wanted to bring Bovet back, to the region of Switzerland where the House of Bovet has been a watchmaking brand since the 19th century—to defend uniqueness, quality rather than quantity, and the bespoke,” Raffy says. “That is the essence of the House of Bovet.”
The idea to create the Prowess 1 was very simple. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when video calling around the world was the norm, errors would be made simply because of time zones. “And I promised myself, we were going to do a mechanical timepiece with the full periods of the year,” he says. A final prototype was ready to go in the summer of 2022, to be launched at Watches & Wonders 2023, but Raffy pulled the plug at the last minute to re-do the movement. “[You take a collector and they would have said]—you did 99 per cent, one per cent is missing,” Raffy explains. The launch was pushed back one year, to Watches & Wonders 2024, during which time the brand settled on the roller system as it is today.
View more photos of the Bovet Recital 28 up close
The Prowess 1 is not a limited edition, but the complexity of its manufacture is such that only eight pieces can be made each year. It is 46mm in diameter and is offered in three case materials—red gold, platinum, or titanium. “This is truly innovative, never been done, and is really bringing something to watchmaking history,” Raffy says. “This is the Prowess 1.”
