We were at the Lausanne area and decided to visit the Petermann Bédat atelier in the neighbourhood of Renes. And share with you a bit more detail on the story of these two remarkable young men trying to carve a name for themselves in the world of independent watchmaking.
The workshop is in a modern industrial building, and directly next door to the atelier of Dominique Renaud. If you remember from our first story of Petermann Bédat , the took a mentorship offer from Dominique in exchange of payment for helping to decorate the non-functional prototype of the DR01 First Twelve, a project which we are also keen to find out the progress of what happened.
The workshop is mostly self contained. And I understand they designed the Seconde Morte movement themselves, under the guidance of Dominique Renaud. And all assembly, decoration is done in the facilities. The aim is for them to be able to produce every component needed for the movement in-house in this atelier.
The atelier is rather small-ish, but is packed with machines of all descriptions which will allow the duo to make almost everything in-house.
We learnt that of the two watches they had produced when we first met them in Singapore, one has been sold, and the other one is currently being refinished. We were hoping to photograph a final watch and do an in-depth review, but this was not possible. We did manage to take a few photographs of this watch, now out of its case.
Both Gaël and Florian work on their own benches in the workshop.
Photo Notes: Photographs were taken with the Phase One XF IQ4 150 with Schneider Kreuchnach Blue Line lenses at 45mm and 120mm Macro. Both available light streaming in through the large windows and a Broncolor Siros L strobe was used. The Watchscape wallpaper image was made by the Focus Stacking Tool in the XF. 15 exposures were made and combined in Helicon Focus to produce an image with very large depth of field.
