{"id":2112351,"date":"2026-10-11T10:33:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-11T08:33:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/?p=2112351"},"modified":"2026-10-13T12:49:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-13T10:49:29","slug":"louis-erard-marqueterie-de-paille-rye-straw-dial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/2026\/10\/11\/louis-erard-marqueterie-de-paille-rye-straw-dial\/","title":{"rendered":"Louis Erard Marqueterie de Paille: Bernardo d’Orey’s Rye Straw"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On a wall panel or the top of a statement piece of furniture, rye straw has square metres in which to catch the light. Set in a 39 mm polished steel case, beneath a domed sapphire crystal where the space between dial and hands narrows to less than a millimetre, the material imposes a merciless constraint<\/sup>. Rye is alive: it absorbs humidity, swells, undulates, contracts. Subjecting it to the tolerances of watchmaking casing demands constraining it without ever breaking the natural silica varnish that gives it its shimmer<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Lisbon, the marquetry artisan Bernardo d’Orey treats this rustic plant with the regard owed to precious metals<\/sup>. Each rye stem is split lengthwise, flattened and crushed with a folding tool to extract the usable ribbon<\/sup>. To compose the abstract \u201cBroken Ice\u201d motif of this edition of 25 pieces, 28 independent sections are cut with a scalpel<\/sup>. The difficulty is not geometric: it lies in the microscopic orientation of the plant fibres<\/sup>. Depending on the angle at which the strand is glued, the tinted blue shifts from sapphire to cyan through simple optical reflection<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assembly is carried out to a tolerance of less than a tenth of a millimetre<\/sup>. Between each section, the joint tolerates neither gap nor overlap, which would create an excess thickness fatal to the passage of the rhodium-plated hands<\/sup>. Bernardo d’Orey works in sequences of gestural apnoea: the eye tires quickly, and bone glue forgives no second thoughts<\/sup>. A stem crushed too hard loses its relief; an imprecise cut means discarding the dial<\/sup>. It takes nearly twelve hours of work spread over two days to fix these 28 facets, turning an agricultural stem into a mineral surface that deceives the eye<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beneath this marquetry, Louis Erard installs an automatic Sellita SW261-1 calibre stripped of its seconds function so as not to disturb the tension of the composition<\/sup>. The openworked oscillating weight, visible through a black-tinted transparent caseback, recalls the mechanical pragmatism that underpins the work<\/sup>. The contrast is stark between the industrial rigour of the steel case, water-resistant to 50 metres, and the vulnerability of the plant fibre imprisoned beneath glass<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It remains to be seen how this dialogue between artisanal micro-craft and series watchmaking will hold up over time, when thermal variations test the adhesion of these 28 strands under tension<\/sup>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Detail<\/strong> Tolerance below 0.1 mm<\/em>: so that the 28 straw sections fit together without creating a step beneath the hand tube<\/sup>, each edge of rye stem is bevelled by hand before gluing<\/sup>, preventing any overlap of material in a vertical space limited to a total case height of 12.82 millimetres<\/sup>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At Louis Erard, marquetry leaves the furniture to become a dial. The interest of the piece lies not only in the strangeness of the material, but in the precision required to fit twenty-eight sections of rye straw into thirty-nine millimetres.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":214,"featured_media":2080233,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30122],"tags":[53550],"class_list":["post-2112351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-watches-and-jewelry","tag-arts-and-crafts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/214"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2112351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2112351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2080233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2112351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2112351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.luxsure.fr\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2112351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}