Czapek & Cie opens a flagship boutique at Quai des Bergues 27 in Geneva, the quay where François Czapek founded the Maison in 1845. Two watches mark the homecoming: the Quai des Bergues “Midnight in Geneva” in a new 40.5 mm case, and the Promenade Transparencies Aqua Blue, the second execution of Czapek’s transparent-dial project.
Quai des Bergues is not simply an address for Czapek & Cie. It is the quay where François Czapek, a Czech-born Polish watchmaker who fled to Geneva after the failed Warsaw uprising of 1830, founded the company that would carry his name on the first of May, 1845, and went on to open the first watchmaking boutique on the Place Vendôme in Paris. Nearly two centuries later, the Maison revived in 2015 by a group of passionate entrepreneurs has returned to the same stretch of waterfront, opening a flagship at number 27.
Xavier de Roquemaurel, CEO of Czapek & Cie, frames the return as a deliberate one. “After naming our first collection ‘Quai des Bergues’, opening a flagship on the Quai des Bergues was an obvious dream that we have had for a long time,” he said. “This is where it all started, not just for Czapek, but for modern watchmaking in Geneva, with the Cabinotiers taking over the upper levels of the buildings on the quay to get the light from the sun and stay away from the noise of the city. The first collection of the revived Czapek in 2015 was a tribute to this era. Coming back here is a statement about what we stand for.”
The boutique at Quai des Bergues 27 introduces Czapek’s new store concept, developed with the design agency Live Teams and first used in authorised-retailer corners from late 2023. The Geneva flagship is its debut in a standalone space. The layout departs from the usual conventions of watchmaking retail. No counter stands between the visitor and the collection. Shared tables and open display stands arrange the room around dialogue rather than transaction, an invitation to browse, settle in, and engage without pressure. The raw stone walls draw on the historic Geneva streetscape, paired with American walnut furniture and midnight blue Alcantara. Oskar Zięta’s Rondo sculptures preside over the space, mirror-polished steel forms shaped by what the Polish-born artist calls a “controlled loss of control,” a mastery that leaves room for the material to find its own expression. In their curved surfaces the visitor finds a reflection, a detail the brand reads as a reminder that the person wearing the watch is the element that matters most. A separate living-room area is set aside for longer conversations and collector services, and the main gallery puts the full range of Czapek’s collections, calibres, and vintage watches within reach from the entrance.
The doors opened to the public in July 2026. An inaugural evening on the first of September gathered press, collectors, local institutions, and friends of the brand on the eve of Geneva Watch Days, where Czapek counts itself among the original partners.
Midnight in Geneva, Revisited
When Czapek opened its first modern Geneva boutique in 2019, at Rue de la Corraterie 18, it marked the occasion with the Quai des Bergues “Midnight in Geneva,” a limited edition of 18 pieces in a 42.5 mm stainless steel case with a deep blue aventurine dial and the hand-wound Calibre SXH1. For the inauguration of Quai des Bergues 27, Czapek revisits that founding gesture in a new 40.5 mm case format, a third case size within the Quai des Bergues line. The case retains the original’s key signatures, the curved silhouette, the lug geometry, and the sapphire caseback that opens onto the movement. The case-side recesses have been adjusted to accommodate the calibre, and the lug slope refined to fit a wider range of wrist sizes.
The dark blue aventurine glass dial is presented here for the first time in this diameter. Aventurine is a demanding material, complex, fragile, and unforgiving of compromise. The particular challenge of this format lies in the recessed sub-dials for the small seconds and the power-reserve indicator. Rather than carving cavities into the aventurine, the main dial is cut through entirely, and the sub-dials are set onto the underlying base metal plate, a construction of just 0.4 mm thickness visible through the apertures. The technique demands precision at every stage to preserve the integrity of the aventurine while achieving the finish expected of a Czapek dial.
At the heart of the piece sits Calibre SXH1, Czapek’s proprietary hand-wound movement, delivering a seven-day power reserve on two barrel springs. The variable inertia balance wheel beats at 3 Hz, or 21,600 vibrations per hour, across 31 jewels and 160 components. The bridges are open on the gear train, with double open ratchets, sandblasted bridges and main plate, heat-blued screws, bevelling, and final hand-chamfering, with circular graining and snailing on the wheels. The movement is visible through the sapphire caseback, the finishing as considered on the reverse as on the dial side.
As with its 2019 predecessor, the new edition is limited to 18 pieces, a nod to the address of Czapek’s first modern Geneva boutique at Rue de la Corraterie 18, where the Midnight in Geneva story began. The piece is available at the new Geneva flagship and through a selection of authorised retailers worldwide, with immediate delivery.
Promenade Transparencies Aqua Blue
Transparency has become a continuing project at Czapek rather than a one-off. The Promenade Transparencies Aqua Blue is the second execution of an idea the house first set down in the Viridian Green, where a sapphire dial stops being an opaque face and lets the eye travel into the movement’s architecture. Other models in the Promenade collection carry solid dials, whether guilloché, mother-of-pearl and aventurine, Grand Feu enamel, or gem-set surfaces. Only the two Transparencies models leave the movement exposed on both faces, with a fumé achieved at the level of coating density rather than pigment.
The sapphire has not been tinted or lacquered. The blue fumé is the product of metallization, a vapour-deposition process that lays a metallic coating onto the underside of the crystal as a field of microscopic dots, each about eight microns across and thinner than a human hair. These dots cluster more densely toward the periphery and thin out as they approach the small-seconds register at 4:30, and the graduated blue tone is an artefact of that density rather than of any pigment. The centre of the disc stays see-through, while the edge goes opaque. This is the same process Czapek established on the first Transparencies, the Viridian Green, carried over intact and shifted to a new chromatic register.
Vapour deposition is more familiar than its name suggests. The anti-reflective coating on an eyeglass or camera lens is a thin metal layer laid down the same way, as is the low-emissivity film that controls heat on architectural glass. The gold tint of a machine-shop cutting tool comes from a titanium-nitride coating, and the colour-tinted stainless steel on building facades and consumer electronics relies on the same family of processes. The physics is shared, and only the substrate changes.
Where the Viridian Green set metallic indexes into the dial, the Aqua Blue replaces each one with a hand-applied block of Superluminova in light blue, fixed directly to the sapphire crystal. The blocks glow in the same light-blue tone after dark, changing how the dial reads in daylight and in the dark alike.
Calibre SXH7 sits at the centre of the Aqua Blue, an automatic movement that takes Czapek’s SXH5 and opens it up completely so that the skeletonised architecture reads as clearly through the dial as through the caseback. The architecture was re-engineered around that demand, with the escapement reversed and the small seconds relocated to a sub-dial at 4:30 so it could be driven directly off the fourth wheel, while the crown and keyless works were redesigned to sit correctly on the dial side. The seven bridges that hold the gear train are openworked and angled inward from the movement’s edge, a layout Czapek presents as a nod to the multi-bridge pocket watches of its 19th-century namesake, François Czapek.
The SXH7 calibre first appeared in the Antarctique Révélation we covered at Watches & Wonders 2023, and it has since become Czapek’s vehicle for two-sided transparency. Open-worked ratchets, sandblasted bridges, hand-chamfered inward angles, and straight-grained flanks are applied symmetrically front and back, roughly doubling the manual finishing work compared with a movement finished on one face alone. The calibre runs at 4 Hz, or 28,800 vibrations per hour, on 25 jewels and delivers a 60-hour power reserve from a single barrel. It is built from 152 parts across a 30-millimetre diameter and a 4.2-millimetre height, and it carries the same recycled and engraved 950 platinum micro-rotor as in the Antarctique Révélation.
“Transparencies plays with the excitement of seeing some details yet not all of them, letting our imagination figure out the rest of the gearing, like the organs of a beautiful body… a sort of mechanical eroticism that has always been an inspiration behind Calibre 5 and its ‘cousin,’ Calibre 7,” said Xavier de Roquemaurel, CEO of Czapek & Cie. “The blue shades originate from the small seconds, echoing the Promenade collection’s signature off-centred small-seconds counter. A tribute to Czapek’s design language, built on symmetry and surprise.”
The Aqua Blue is a limited edition of 38 pieces, available to order through Czapek authorised retailers, the Geneva flagship boutique, and czapek.com as of 20 August 2026.
Photo credits: Czapek.
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