The gérald genta Minute Repeater: Come For Caliber GG-002, Stay For The Intricate Case

The new repeater from Gérald Genta is not exactly a suprising introduction from the company, which since its relaunch in 2023, has been headquarted at La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, located in Geneva. The company is under the direction of Jean Arnault, with Enrico Barbasini and Michel Navas as head movement constructors, and Matthieu Hegi as artistic director. The company thus far has kept production numbers quite low and in all probability they will remain so for the foreseeable future, with the catalog at present consisting of the Oursin Collection (named after the spiny sea urchin) a piece unique minute repeater made for the last and technically troubled edition of Only Watch,  and now, the gérald genta Minute Repeater (yes, the company styles its name all lower case). The new minute repeater appears to be a simple watch at first but there is quite a lot more than meets the eye at first glance, including a highly complex case construction which is designed to make the entire watch act as a resonating chamber for the gongs.

The design of the watch is a careful update to some of Gérald Genta’s more widely used design tropes, when he was designing watches for his eponymous brand. One of the best examples of his fondness for ornate, even baroque, case design is this yellow gold Grande et Petite Sonnerie, from 1994, which sounds the time on Westminster chimes and is quite obviously reflective, with its stepped case and barrel lugs, of a fondness for ornamentation as an end in itself.

The new repeater is clearly connected to Genta’s work during his lifetime in design details, but the team at La Fabrique du Temps have I think done an admirable job in creating a watch that is very recognizably linked to Genta’s work, but with a careful restraint in execution. The watch is 40mm x 9.6mm, with somewhat old fashioned but Genta-correct barrel shaped lugs.

The case shape is more or less a cushion case, but with a more rounded silhouette than you usually find in cushion cased watches; it’s a little bit reminiscent of the Patek Golden Ellipse, although it’s a family resemblance only. The multiple steps in the bezel and case which Genta was so fond of in his own work are still there, but better integrated into the shape of the case overall, and they actually remind me a bit of the godron on the case middle of the Daniel Roth Extra Plat.

It is conventional wisdom that the best material for a repeater case is pink or red gold, although the composition of the case alloy or material is only part of the equation. The structure of the case overall can have a strong effect on the sound, as well as of course, factors like the tuning and tempo of the gongs, the force with which the hammers strike and the speed with which they recoil, and on and on. There are few absolute rules in minute repeater designs – one of the most beautiful repeaters I’ve ever heard was one at the Audemars Piguet Museum, some years ago, which should not have sounded good according to the rules – it was tiny (rectangular, and probably less than 30mm along its longest side) and with a platinum case, but the sound was clear, pleasant, and quite loud for such a small watch. It’s true of all watchmaking that it is less what you do than how you do it, but it is especially true of minute repeaters.

The choice of yellow gold for the gérald genta minute repeater is I think, a more appropriate one than red gold; it’s more in line with Genta’s historical work and somehow seems a better fit stylistically to the design overall, with its echoes of Genta’s own work and of mid to late-20th century dress watches in general.

The dial, interestingly enough, is onyx, though you might think it’s enamel at first glance (hardstone dials were favorites of Genta’s in his own work).  The indexes are applied, with their feet going straight through holes drilled into the dial, and the stick hands are very finely polished and elegantly thin; stick hands can feel perfunctory but not so here. The minute track has a couple of interesting features. First, it follows the case outlines on the outer edge, and is circular on the inner edge, making a subtle but obviously thoughtfully handled transition from the case to the dial proper. The second is that there are no five minute markers at 15 minutes and 45 minutes, which allows the minutes track to taper smoothly (and of course, trying to squeeze those numbers into the reduced available space would have been unwise).

The minutes track and gérald genta logo are transfer printed onto the dial, which though spare in its details, adds up to an exercise in restrained elegance in which the details clearly show the thought that went into the composition overall.

The movement, caliber GG-002, is in just about every respect, an exercise in classic repeater construction.

The movement design is harmonious and visually well organized. The center of the movement is occupied by the going train center wheel, with the third and fourth wheel pivots under their own jewels moving to the left. The escape wheel and lever have their own separate bridges, located under the balance. The centrifugal governor on the lower left, is jeweled on its pivots and forms an equilateral triangle with the center wheel and balance jewels. The mainspring barrel and ratchet wheel are under their own bridge up above, with the ratchet wheel held in place during running by a beautiful bar shaped click spring, which produces both a tactile and auditory experience when the watch is wound (if you have ever had the chance to wind a Simplicity, or one of the Daniel Roth watches, the experience will feel familiar immediately). The governor appears at first to have no upper bridge, but its upper jewel is fixed in a sapphire disk, which sits in a rounded octagonal frame, the octagon having been (as you can see from the Grande et Petite Sonnerie) something of a preferred motif for Genta in his own work.

The movement is adjusted to six positions, rather than the usual five, which exceeds the requirements of the COSC (although the COSC is in the midst of reviewing and possibly revising its standards this year.) METAS testing notably requires testing in six positions, so this is not as unusual in modern watchmaking as it was prior to the debut of METAS in 2015 as there are now millions of movements rated in six positions every year; the Rolex Master Chronometer standard is for six positions as well (so “millions” is not hyperbole here). However, rating in six positions in a watch produced one by one, by hand, to the tune of ten a year, is a different matter as at numbers that small, institutional mass production quality control is not relevant.

Decased, you can see the circular gongs and hammers and governor, which are the only visible parts of the actual repeating mechanism; as is the norm for classically constructed repeaters, the racks, snails, and components like the all or nothing piece which blocks the repeater from chiming unless the slide is pressed fully home, are cadrature – that is to say, under the dial works. The finishing is representative of fine finishing as a natural outcome of good workshop practices, rather than something pursued as an end in itself, but the quality is of course very good. The Geneva stripes are in particular excellent – they have been done, as is the case with the highest standard for Geneva stripes, in such a way that almost no metal has been removed, and the transition from the Geneva stripes to the anglage in particular is very clean (visible grooves at the transition are a sign of lower quality Geneva stripes).

There is an unusual additional detail about the movement, which is otherwise traditional in every aspect, including the finishing, which is the fixture of the gongs to the movement. Normally, gongs are attached at their base to a foot with two screws holding the ends of the gongs in place. However, gérald genta has said that in the Minute Repeater, the gongs are attached to the case, in order to allow the case to act as a more efficient resonator, for better tone and better volume. At first glance it looks as if the foot of the gongs is attached to the mainplate in the usual manner but a closer look shows something more interesting.

Above you can see that the foot of the gongs appear to be attached to a flange running around the circumference of the movement. There are two tabs next to the mainspring barrel bridge, and matching tabs on the flange on the opposite side of the movement, next to the balance. It looks like those tabs are where the gongs are mechanically coupled to the case itself.

The picture above shows the movement in the case, as seen from the back. The tabs on the flange match corresponding tabs on the inside of the case. You’ll also notice that the case itself has been quite dramatically hollowed out. The physical connection between the gongs and the case, combined with the case construction, means that the entire case acts as a resonator. This is of course, always the case with repeaters, but here the team at La Fabrique du Temps have taken specific steps to ensure that the ability of the case to capture and transmit sound has been optimized as much as possible. At its thinnest point, the case is just 0.6mm thick, and the crystal is less than a millimeter thick as well, at 0.8mm.

The movement is dropped into the case middle from the front, and here you can see the screws holding the tabs on the flange to the tabs on the case – and you can see once again how radically the case has been hollowed out, allowing it to become acoustically part of the gongs. It looks like the four screws holding the caseback in place, pass through the case middle (you can see the holes for the screws next to the tabs for the flange) and screw into the underside of the bezel. This compresses the bezel, caseback, and case middle into a single unit, which again improves sound wave propagation.

Much of the work on minute repeaters over the last 25 years has focused on introducing new methods and materials – AP, for instance, uses an internal resonating membrane in its Supersonnerie watches; Jaeger-LeCoultre pioneered the use of synthetic sapphire for gongs, the technique of attaching the foot of the gongs directly to the underside of the crystal, and so on; Bulgari currently holds the world’s record for the world’s thinnest minute repeater, with the 3.12mm thick Octo Finissimo minute repeater. The gérald genta repeater, on the other hand, is a purely traditional approach, using only traditional watchmaking methods and materials, but optimized to get the most out of classic repeater construction and design. The repeater remains a complication that resists industrialization – the genta repeater uses gongs which are cut and filed to the correct length in order to produce the correct tone, for instance, which is the norm for high end traditional repeaters, where hand-tuning the goings and hand adjusting tempo and factors like the action of the hammers, are par for the course. Michel Navas and Enrico Barbasini both worked with Gerald Genta during the first incarnation of his brand, and the knowledge they brought to that first generation of repeaters is still very much with us today.

The gérald gental Minute Repeater, ref. EBFE01A1: case, Yellow gold, 3N, 40mm x 9.6mm; black onyx dial; yellow gold hands and indexes. Movement, caliber GG-002, hand wound minute repeater, 32.4mm x 5.46mm, running at 3Hz/31,600 vph in 32 jewels; power reserve 80 hours. Limited series with production of 10 pieces per year. 

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