From Cattle Fodder to High-End Watches

Ms de Caunes, who has practiced the craft since the 1980s, was inspired by the legacy of her grandfather, André Groult, an interior designer who, along with the decorator Jean-Michel Frank, championed straw marquetry in the late 1920s and '30s.The technique, unchanged for centuries, is time-consuming In January, at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva, Ulysse Nardin presented the first high-complication timepiece to use straw marquetry on the dial.

Among them, a limited-edition sterling silver clock finished in palladium with iolite cabochon and the straw marquetry treatment on the dial and base was introduced two years ago, as was the Rotonde Lion watch with the lion motif created in straw For La Montre Hermès, the watchmaking division of the luxury house, the idea to explore straw marquetry was born about 2010, around the same time that the house revisited Mr Frank's design repertoire by producing some of the interior designer's straw marquetry furniture for its home furnishing line.

"Certain traditional crafts like straw marquetry are not integrated in-house in our watchmaking division so we looked for outside know-how for ways to apply straw on a watch dial," Philippe Delhotal, the division's creative director, said in an interview in Paris The scale of a dial and the special tools needed to work on a small area make it difficult to experiment with straw marquetry in watches, but some artisans are pushing the boundaries, exploring ways of combining straw with other materials to create richer patterns In 2017, Ms.

Saneuil created the dial of Piaget's Aquatic Maze timepiece from wood and straw marquetry in gradients of blue and green chosen to evoke the shimmering waters off the Amalfi Coast of Italy. . Source