The Bell & Ross BR-X3 Micro-Rotor Continues The Brand’s High-Concept Foray

When Bell & Ross released the BR-X3 Tourbillon Micro-Rotor (RM395,000, limited to 25 pieces) at last year’s Dubai Watch Week, it came as a surprise. After all, the French brand is best known for its tough- and rugged-looking aviation instrument-inspired watches. Here, instead, we had something a lot more avant-garde, with a new, artfully designed skeleton movement—a high complication no less—and packaged in a 40mm, largely transparent sapphire case. In fact, if it weren’t for the four screws at each corner, it would be difficult to see any link to Bell & Ross at all.

This is not a bad thing. Designers like Bruno Belamich—the ‘Bell’ in Bell & Ross—need to flex their muscles every once in a while. And, this time, he’s done it in a focused, high-concept fashion: the movement, developed in partnership with Concepto, has as much as possible put its components in a single plane on a grid-like structure. This means that key components, including geartrain, micro-rotor, tourbillon cage, and offset timing dial, are individually part of the composition—as is the negative space between them. And it is all quite slim, too: the watch is only 9mm thick, lending the timepiece a bit of dressy elegance.

“Bell & Ross has built its identity around the key principles of legibility, functionality, precision, and reliability, that are coming from cockpit instruments. But, this time, we wanted to demonstrate that Bell & Ross is also capable of inventing and creating a haute horlogerie timepiece. And the idea for Bruno was to create a watch in a square case where the movement is clearly the hero,” explains Fabien de Nonancourt, general manager at Bell & Ross. “The challenge was to build a movement only on vertical and horizontal lines, and as few lines as possible.” He adds that Belamich had two main inspirations in mind for the project: Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, famous for abstract art built on grids and quadrilateral shapes; and French architect and designer Charlotte Perriand, known for her minimalist yet functional style.

It is a rich concept, and Belamich clearly thought so as well because, earlier this year, Bell & Ross released a second watch that plays along similar lines: the BR-X3 Micro-Rotor (RM96,600, limited to 99 pieces). It would have been easy to make this merely a less complicated version of the previous watch, but Belamich has opted to explore it from a slightly different angle. Rather than leaving the movement fully skeletonised, the gaps in its grid structure have instead been filled in with plates. The result is a different take on negative space—transparency has been reduced, but the movement is still highlighted, especially as its bridges are mirror-polished while the plates are matte, which makes the grid structure even more prominent. It is exactly the same size as the BR-X3 Tourbillon Micro-Rotor: 40mm square and 9mm thick.

“It became obvious we should do another execution, in a different way. We opted for a non-tourbillon, semi-skeletonised piece. The approach we have is rather different from what most people are doing, De Nonancourt says. “We investigated how we can fill the empty space, so that the three main components of the movement—the spiral, the barrel, and the micro-rotor—are perfectly visible. In a way, it’s the other way around than most competitors, where they start with the plain movement and try to see how they can remove some materials.”

Bell & Ross has had wild experiments before, but it has been some time since we’ve seen something similar to these two releases, which balance design, horology, and restrained elegance. “It was a good exercise, not only for design but also to create a new movement with our own specifications,” De Nonancourt adds. “Definitely, there will be more to come.”

Bell & Ross