Cintrée Curvex

The Cintrée Curvex shape was born even before the brand itself: Franck Muller first presented it in 1987 at an Italian watch fair, when he was still working as a restorer and small independent maker in Geneva. When in 1991, together with Vartan Sirmakes, he founded Technowatch SA — the company that would become Franck Muller — this barrel case was chosen as the distinctive element of every collection, effectively becoming the new Maison's visual trademark even before the name itself became one.

Unlike the traditional tonneau, curved on only two levels, the Cintrée Curvex brings the case's three axes to converge into a single spherical point by curving across four levels: the result is a case that hugs the wrist more closely and, at the same time, gives the dial a slightly domed surface, consistent with the equally curved sapphire crystal. It is on this case that, over the course of the 1990s, the brand built its nickname "Master of Complications": the 1993 Caliber 93 and the 1994 Caliber 94, with minute repeaters, patented tourbillons and perpetual calendars, were both housed in Cintrée Curvex cases.

Over time the Cintrée Curvex has housed both relatively simple models — three hands, small seconds, calendar — and the most ambitious complications in the Franck Muller catalog, up to the 2009 Grande Complication Aeternitas Mega 4, with 36 complications and 1,483 components. Precisely because of this ability to adapt to every level of complication, the Cintrée Curvex remains to this day the brand's most representative and longest-running line, the one from which later collections such as Vanguard and Crazy Hours conceptually derive.