Most watches that track the sun do it with numbers. Krayon’s Anywhere does it with a small painted sun traveling a 24-hour ring, and on the new Magnolia edition, two hand-painted petals do the pointing. One petal marks sunrise. The other marks sunset. The flowers are the complication.
The watch is the latest Métiers d’Art turn for the Anywhere, Rémi Maillat’s sunrise and sunset watch, and it stays small and serious: a 39 mm case in Pt950 platinum, 9.5 mm thick, on a hand-stitched black alligator strap. Fifteen pieces will be made. Each dial is painted by hand, so no two are alike.
Krayon publishes no price for the edition, and at fifteen pieces in platinum it doesn’t need one. This is an order-book watch, built in Neuchâtel for collectors who already know the manufacture’s name.
A platinum case around a black onyx sky
The dial is a disc of deep black onyx, and it’s the right stone for the job. Onyx gives the painter a true black to work against, so the pink and white petals sit on the surface like blossoms resting on dark water. Around the edge runs the 24-hour rehaut, marked from midnight to midday and back, with SIX AM and SIX PM spelled out where the light changes.
Central hands give the hours and minutes the conventional way. Everything else on the dial belongs to the sun. A small sun disc rides the 24-hour scale as the hour indicator, and the date and month sit together in a subdial at 6 o’clock, ringed by petals that look scattered rather than arranged.
The case finishing keeps the platinum quiet. Polished, slim, and deliberately plain, it leaves the dial to do all the talking, which suits a watch whose dial is a painting.
Calibre C030 keeps the sun on schedule
The movement is Krayon’s Calibre C030, hand-wound, 35.40 mm across and just 5.00 mm thick. It runs at 3 Hz, holds 72 hours of power reserve, and packs 432 components and 55 jewels into that slim stack. The architecture is patented, because nobody else builds a sunrise this way.
Here’s the trick the calibre performs. Set the watch for a place, any place on Earth, and it works out when the sun comes up and goes down there, day after day, through the whole year. The date and month at 6 o’clock feed the calculation, and the wearer’s chosen location sets the terms.
As the seasons shift, sunrise and sunset drift with them, and the display drifts too. The sector of the dial between the two markers is the day itself, drawn to scale. In June it’s wide. In December it squeezes down to a sliver.
Conventional world-time watches hand you a ring of preset cities and call it universal. Krayon took the opposite tack. The Anywhere is a personal ephemeris, set to the one place its wearer picks, and it descends from the Everywhere, the manufacture’s first hypercomplication, which took the Innovation Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in 2018. Both watches share the patent.
Look through the caseback and the setting system sits at 6 o’clock, racks and yokes arranged around a central screw, with two discreet screws a watchmaker turns to tune the discs to the chosen place. The bridges are beveled by hand, inward and outward angles included. None of that shows on the dial. All of it is why the dial can be trusted.
The petals are the complication
On earlier Anywhere models, markers did this work. On the Magnolia, two painted petals take the job. The petal on the left disc points up for sunrise. Its partner on the right disc points down for sunset. Both travel around the dial as the year turns, tracking the light the way the mechanism tracks it.
The painting covers the whole scene, petal after petal in miniature, done by a single highly experienced miniature painter from the Neuchâtel region. Some cluster thick around the calendar. Others drift alone across the black. Look closely at the upper dial and three petals meet to form a Y, Krayon’s own mark, hidden in the weather.
Fifteen dials, fifteen moments after the rain
The scene comes from outside the manufacture’s own windows. A magnolia tree stands directly opposite Krayon at 13 Rue de l’Evole in Neuchâtel, and every spring, around the start of April, it blooms for a few weeks. Rain knocks the petals down. From the reception room, the team watches them fall against the blue of the lake.
Each of the fifteen dials catches that fall a fraction differently, the petals shifted from one composition to the next. Krayon calls them fifteen scenarios. Same tree, same rain, never the same instant twice.
Magnolia extends a run of Métiers d’Art Anywhere pieces that treats the dial as a canvas and the complication as the frame. A Monet-inspired unique piece went to Only Watch in 2021. Azur followed in miniature painting, Arborea borrowed Rousseau’s jungles, and Parhelion swapped paint for gemstones. The founders, engineers Rémi Maillat and Fei Hou, keep returning to the same idea: the mechanism stays serious, the surface gets to dream.
Fifteen pieces, each one a spring morning that ended years ago, still telling you when tomorrow’s sun comes up. That’s the whole argument for this watch, and it doesn’t need a price tag to make it.
