A Watchmaker Who Seizes the Moment

Time may be divided into past, present and future, but for the independent Swiss watchmaker Ludovic Ballouard, the only time that counts is the present.

It’s a philosophy he developed the hard way, through personal suffering and loss. Watching his wife, Eveline, endure cancer for 10 years took a toll. “I realized you have to live in the moment,” he said. “Time is now.”

Mr. Ballouard’s work, known for being innovative yet iconoclastic, expresses his carpe-diem approach to life. On the rule-breaking Upside Down watch introduced in 2009, 11 of the hour markers are displayed upside down on the dial — the only one right-side up tells the current hour, the present.

As he sipped espresso in his atelier about six miles outside Geneva, he took one of his Upside Down watches out of its case and showed how it worked, turning the hands until the number of the current hour flipped up. Then he showed the clear, skeleton back, with the B01 movement he created, and pointed out that he had used 200-year-old techniques. “I got the idea when I was repairing old watches,” he said.

His other watch style, the Half Time with the B02 movement he created, came out in 2012 in homage to Eveline, who died in 2017. The watch, he said, expressed the “spirit of love as two pieces on the dial come together” to show the time. The hours on the dial are unreadable except for the current one. “The past is gone,” he said. “The future is unknown,” and only the present hour “clicks in place, so you focus on the present moment.”

His Upside Down and Half Time watches are “a very classic design, not show-offs, but classic with complications,” he said. He works in red gold and platinum and dials can be malachite, meteorite, aventurine, lapis lazuli, osmium or studded with diamonds, enameled or guillochéd by the noted horologist Brittany Nicole Cox, who “only works for me,” he said.