A year ago, MB&F posed a question that ran against its own DNA: after two decades spent imagining horological machines resembling spaceships or mechanical creatures, could the Geneva manufacture design an elegant 38-millimetre watch? The answer was called SP One, the first chapter of a collection named Special Projects. A year later, that same architecture is set with 255 diamonds under the name SP One Pavée — and it is precisely here that the exercise becomes interesting.
The original SP One was organised around three circles: the barrel, the balance wheel and the inclined dial, as if suspended in the centre of the case. Housed in the smallest and thinnest case the house has ever produced, its pebble-shaped architecture cultivated a deliberate discretion, somewhere between the radical vocabulary of the Horological Machines and the more classical approach of the Legacy Machines. A piece conceived, even at the outset, as a point of balance rather than a manifesto.
The contrast is all the more striking because Special Projects is, in the house’s vocabulary, only one chapter among others — the Horological Machines remain the ground of the most experimental forms, while the Legacy Machines stay closer to traditional watchmaking. By choosing to move precisely this third path towards preciousness, rather than one of the other two, MB&F seems to indicate that the discretion of the SP One was from the start a form of conscious restraint — and that the diamond, here, does not contradict this restraint but extends it.
For this new version, MB&F did not seek to style the watch further but to reveal a more precious expression of it, without touching what made it singular. Made in 18-carat white gold, the SP One Pavée is set with 255 diamonds for a total of 1.608 carats. The house’s choice deserves note: rather than covering the case uniformly, the setting follows the existing curves — those of the case, the amphitheatre-shaped inner bezel, the crown and the buckle — so as to frame the movement without erasing its sculptural character. The inclined dial, for its part, abandons its black finish in favour of a dark blue PVD.
Inside, nothing changes from what made the piece technically interesting. The in-house developed, hand-wound movement has 189 components and offers 72 hours of power reserve, with its balance wheel suspended at 2 o’clock and its inclined display at 6 o’clock. The traditional finishes — hand-bevelled wheels, polished bevels, hand engraving — still occupy a central place. For this Pavée version, the bridges are rhodium-plated, a choice that matches them to the white gold and the setting rather than being a mere aesthetic gesture.
Offered at 78,000 Swiss francs excluding taxes (about 104,000 US dollars or 85,000 euros excluding taxes), the SP One Pavée raises a broader question than that of price or the number of stones set: how does a house built on the idea of rupture negotiate its encounter with the most established codes of horological jewellery? MB&F seems to have chosen not to settle it — to let the diamond bend to the architecture rather than the reverse. It remains to be seen whether this precious discretion opens a new chapter for Special Projects, or whether it remains a parenthesis in a house that, by nature, prefers the unexpected.
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