Franck Muller

Franck Muller was founded in 1991 from the meeting between the thirty-three-year-old Geneva watchmaker Franck Muller — trained at the Geneva School of Watchmaking and already capable, in 1984, of making his own wristwatch tourbillon — and Vartan Sirmakes, a fifty-one-year-old Armenian expert in cases and precious stones. Together they founded, in Genthod on the shores of Lake Geneva, the company Technowatch SA. Success was almost immediate: already in 1992 Muller created what was described as the most complicated wristwatch in the world, with a perpetual calendar with retrograde months, equation of time, date and day indication, leap-year indicator, moon phase and thermometer — a record the brand repeated in 1998.

The distinctive trait that makes Franck Muller instantly recognizable is the "Cintrée Curvex" case, first presented in 1987 at an Italian watch fair and adopted from 1991 as the stylistic signature of the new Maison: a barrel shape in which, unlike the traditional two-level tonneau, the case's three curved axes converge on four levels into a single spherical point. Around this case, the brand built its nickname as "Master of Complications" over the following years: the 1993 Caliber 93 combines in a carillon a rattrapante chronograph, minute repeater, perpetual calendar and temperature indication, while the 1994 Caliber 94 introduces a minute repeater with a strike indicator and a patented tourbillon.

The Genthod headquarters, a neo-Gothic villa built in the early twentieth century by architect Edmond Fatio, over time became the famous "Watchland": in 1998 Technowatch SA was renamed Franck Muller Watchland SA, and the brand began to vertically integrate its production, reaching manufacture status in 2006 with its own FM 3200 and FM 3210 chronograph calibers. The high point of this path came in 2009 with the Grande Complication Aeternitas Mega 4, the result of five years of development, 36 complications and 1,483 components.