Andreas Strehler

Watchmaker

10 Years ago, Andreas Strehler was presenting his first creation: The perpetual Calendar. This combination of a desk calendar and a pocket watch, whose interaction reminds of the “Pendule Sympathique” created from Abraham Louis Breguet, but adopted for the time of today. He was teaming up a interaction of a mechanical memory and a immediate synchronisation together with a absolute user friendly interface. Already one year later the watch „Zwei“ of Andreas Strehler was released. A watch with the attribute to switch the displays similar to a digital watch. However, this mechanism allows to combine multifunctional displays by the use of differential gears.

As a developer Andreas Strehler has already worked for well-known watch companies like Chronoswiss, Maurice Lacroix, H.Moser & Cie. and Harry Winston. As a result of this occupation his company UhrTeil AG was created.

The watch line „Zwei“ is distinguished by absolute understatement. You cannot imagine the technical complexity in it. As simple the idea seems to be to switch the display as complex is the solution with the differential gears. But now several years later other watch brands try to imitate this concept.

In the opposit to the “Zwei” he created his new line „Papillon“. Andreas Strehler was presenting in 2007, together with Harry Winston, the „OPUS7“. The “Papillon” is a turn of 180° to all his Watches before. Instead of focusing on the displays the attention is mainly set on the movement itself. Here the shapes seem to be naturally grown into a world of gearwheels. The curved profiles of the bridges and levers twine around the gearwheels and as a result the swinging ends up in a harmonious whole.

Like once upon the time in the early 20th Century, a time when “Jugendstil” and “Art Nouveau” even influenced the technical world, Andreas Strehler melt together the curved elegance of the nature and mechanic. It is a reinterpretation of the same glimpses of mind as even Gustave Eiffel used in his buildings: The Form follows the function but by side of the mechanical function of every element it has to fit the function of elegance too. In Face to put abstract elements of hands and dials on top of the movement it is the movement itself which shows the time with its gears. “Papillon”, a watch that invites you to dream of a world of gears and iron flowers.