At Geneva Watch Days, ahead of its September 2026 release, MB&F presented us a new iteration of the brand’s quietest watch, the SP One. The 2026 edition is the SP One Pavée in 18k white gold with a blue inclined dial and generously set with diamonds reads, at first, as a departure from the whispered sophistication of the founding piece. In hand, the stones flood the movement with reflected light, and its weightless levitating intensifies.
The early autumn morning sun at the Geneva Watch Days has a particular quality. Already low and angled, the kind that turns crystals into lenses and makes every surface either glow or shadow. It was in that light that MB&F showed us the SP One Pavée, ahead of its September release. The intricate watch movement swims in the reflected light of diamonds occupying the previously brushed metal angled inner flange. A diamond pave runs on the outer circle of the case too, giving the impression of a transparent crystal housing. Applying gemstones takes any piece in a more strident direction, but on this one they seem to serve the purpose of directing all attention to the inner calibre.
Beyond the obvious gemstone setting, other material and visual attributes differentiate the 2026 from last year’s release. The case shifts from platinum and 18k rose gold to 18k white gold. The inclined dial at 6 o’clock moves from black to blue PVD. And the strap, offered in green and beige on the founding models, becomes light blue calfskin.
Three Circles
The SP One began as a 2018 sketch that Max Büsser and the MB&F team pulled from a basket of dormant projects during COVID, alongside the M.A.D.1, which became the basket’s other important venture. The sketch was refined and reworked with Eric Giroud, the longtime MB&F Friend, who has shaped much of the brand’s case language. What emerged was a 38mm dress watch, the slimmest and smallest piece in the MB&F catalogue, built around a movement that emphasizes the trinity of the barrel, the balance wheel, and the dial. Each with identical circumference, and appearing to float at the centre of the case rather than sitting on a conventional plate. The same diameter adds a geometric coherence to the levitation. Sapphire crystals front and back admit light from both sides, and the bridges are nearly invisible, with most components hidden beneath the three floating elements so that the eye finds no anchor. The inclined dial, canted to display MB&F’s conical gearing, adds a three-dimensional displacement that is as discreet as it is technically demanding. The architecture is a study in reduction, and the levitation is the effect that everything else serves.
The 2025 founding pair set the context. Platinum with a sky-blue flange, rose gold with an anthracite flange, on green and beige calfskin straps. The restrained watch communicated through proportion and finish rather than volume. The 2026 edition takes that foundation and although it covers the flange and case sides in diamonds, it remains a quietly considered piece rather than a loudly admired.
The Glacier
The diamond circle and the paved case sides are a decoration only in the way a mirror is: a surface that does not hold light but redirects it. The 255 diamonds draw ambient light from every angle and channel it back into the movement as reflected glow. Where the 2025 flange was a flat, brushed surface that diffused light quietly, the diamond circle throws light back upward, into the barrel, the balance wheel, and the dial, and the levitation gains a source it did not have before. The loudest substance in the watchmaker’s vocabulary, set onto one of the quietest watches MB&F has made, intensifies the illusion of weightlessness. The three floating elements, barrel and balance and dial, hover above the glacier of stones like a drone over ice, and the light that the stones gather is the light the movement floats in.
Photo credits: Loupiosity.com.
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