The C1 Bel Canto Lucia puts a songbird at the center of its dial, built from six stamped brass parts and printed in nineteen separate colors. Christopher Ward built the watch with Mr Jones Watches, and the bird isn’t decoration. Its beak and tail run the hourly chime.
Six brass parts, printed in London
Illustrator Andy Wilx designed the scene, saying he wanted to create a world you could peer into, with real depth between the mechanism and the crystal.
Six stamped brass components carry the artwork. The parts traveled to the Mr Jones Watches workshop in London, where each color was applied and set by pad printing, and the bird’s framing elements were gold-plated.
Nineteen colors meant nineteen plates.
Each pass lays one flat color onto parts measuring only a few millimetres, and the layers stack into shading, feathers and foliage across the dial. Finished parts returned to Christopher Ward’s Atelier in Biel for final assembly onto the movement.
The beak opens, and the tail strikes
The name comes from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, where the heroine’s voice trades phrases with a solo flute in the mad scene, the exchanges evoking birdsong.
On the dial, that duet turns mechanical. Pressing the pusher at four o’clock turns a ladybird mounted on the column wheel, and the beak opens or closes to show whether the chime is on.
The tail is the hammer.
It strikes the watch’s signature D note at the top of every hour, while the time itself floats on a fumé sunburst subdial above the foliage. The floating time dial carries an orange fumé sunburst finish, set above the flowers. It keeps the scene below uncluttered.
Sixty-five hours, from a new base movement
Lucia runs Christopher Ward’s FS01-2 chiming movement, a sonnerie au passage that sounds a single chime each hour, paired with Sellita’s SW200-2 Power+ base. It’s the pairing’s first outing in an Atelier watch.
The maker rates the reserve at 65 hours, with a 4Hz frequency and a tolerance of -5/+12 seconds per day. The case is 41mm of Grade 5 titanium. It measures 48mm lug-to-lug and 14.31mm tall, under a new box sapphire crystal, and the closed caseback carries a dedicated Christopher Ward x Mr Jones Watches engraving.
Preorder pricing on the maker’s page starts at $5,550, and one further configuration lists at $5,895. Orders are open now as preorders.
Buy the Lucia at $5,550 if you want a chiming watch whose printed artwork is also a working part of the mechanism. The bird opens, closes and strikes the hour.