Some objects are too personal to be mass produced.

There are watches.
And then there are objects that happen to contain a movement.

Objects made slowly. Made with attachment. Made with the understanding that the person who receives them will carry them for the rest of their life — and that after that life ends, the object will remain.

Vallier & Cie. has only ever made the second kind.

The Collection

The Three Creations.

A Vallier & Cie. watchmaker at work in the atelier.
The Maison

A private maison of horological art.

Vallier & Cie. was founded in Geneva at the end of the nineteenth century by a man who understood — with the certainty of someone who had lived without convention — that the highest purpose of a mechanical object is to preserve what time destroys.

Memory. Emotion. The presence of a person who is no longer present.

The maison does not produce watches for inventory. It creates objects for specific collectors, in editions of deliberate and permanent scarcity. When a piece leaves the workshop, it enters the Vallier Register — a notarially maintained record of every creation and every ownership transfer in the maison's history.

The Vallier Register — sealed by Swiss notary.
The Register

A notarially certified record, under Swiss law.

Every Vallier creation is inscribed, upon transfer of ownership, in the Vallier Register. Each entry records the piece, the collector, the date of transfer, and the number within the series.

Ownership of a Vallier creation may not be transferred, sold, or assigned to a third party within twenty-four months of original acquisition. This is not a commercial condition. It is the maison's position that a Vallier creation is not a financial instrument. It is a personal one.

The collector who acquires a Vallier is acquiring it for themselves. Not for what it may be worth in eighteen months.

The Register