Byrne builds its watches around a single idea: the dial itself is the complication. In place of fixed markers, four indexes sculpted in three dimensions pivot on their own axes, and each face carries a different treatment — Roman, Arabic, a “ghost” set, and one face the owner chooses in the form of a secret digit from 0 to 9, engraved again on the crown. A single watch therefore wears four dials, and the change is driven mechanically by the movement. The house calls the mechanism the Gyro Dial, and every model it has released is built on it.
The idea arrived in 2015 at the Paris Opera. Watching George Balanchine’s “Apollon Musagète”, John Byrne fixed on a tableau of dancers placed one behind another, moving so fast that they gave the impression of a single woman with four faces. He had already spent some thirty years restoring antique and modern timepieces before training as an industrial designer, and he took the idea to his wife Claire Cohen, a retail and luxury specialist who is now the brand’s president. The couple went to Fleurier, in the Val-de-Travers, one of the cradles of Swiss haute horlogerie, and spent several years perfecting the case and the movement. In 2021 the Gyro Dial finally reached the wrist.
The collection rests on two Manufacture calibres. The 5555 drives the Gyro Dial 311, whose sculpted titanium case has produced the Sport, the sandblasted Zero with its exposed rhodium-plated plate, and the Casino pair, which borrow the yellow seven of a slot machine and playing-card motifs. The skeletonised 5557, introduced with the Gyro Dial Meca, moves the winding crown to twelve o’clock in a slimmer 38 mm case and offers 60 hours of power reserve across 243 components. Above them sit the pink gold pieces, one set with black and white diamonds, and the Star — the most advanced calibre the house has built, pairing a universal time display with a Time Flow complication that reveals the moments of the day. Prices run from 18,000 to 55,000 Swiss francs, and an online configurator lets collectors specify their own watch.
