by Brent Robillard
One thousand hours
I first met Stéphane von Gunten in the attic of Villa Sarasin during Time to Watches a couple of years ago. It was warm, slightly chaotic, and full of the kind of independent energy that tends to collect under old wooden beams. I can’t really forget the moment as it’s not every day that someone pulls a mainspring from his pocket, hands you one end and then walks off with the other. Okay, okay. He didn’t actually do that, but he made me imagine it and then walked off about three metres away. That’s three thousand millimetres. You could almost see it uncoiling between us. Quite possibly the longest mainspring ever installed in watch.
It’s an effective way to explain a 1000-hour power reserve. And not such a bad sales pitch, either.
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A House Built on Length
HAUTE-RIVE is not a new name trying to sound old. It traces back to 1888, to Irénée Aubry on the shores of Lake Neuchâtel, and it remains in the hands of a direct descendant. That’s not a level of continuity you find every day. Long power reserves have been part of the house signature from the beginning—eight days with the Hebdomas, forty days in a pocket watch made for Pope Leo XIII, all from a single barrel.
It’s the single barrel we need to take note of here. Plenty of watches achieve long autonomy by stacking barrels. HAUTE-RIVE approaches it differently. One barrel, stretched to its limits, carefully managed. It’s less about adding more and more about refining what’s already there.
The modern expression of that idea is the HR01 calibre, delivering 1000 hours—just over 41 days—of power reserve.
Forty-one days. It will outlast Lent.
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The Honoris Strato: Steel, Finally
The Honoris Strato models—Verde and Blu—mark a notable shift, however. For the first time, the Honoris line moves into steel, after several incarnations in precious metals like 18K white and yellow gold.
The case uses 1.4441 stainless steel (better corrosion resistance, brighter polish), finished with alternating brushed and polished surfaces that emphasise the geometry rather than soften it. A “glassbox” sapphire crystal sits over the dial, giving a clear view into what is less a dial and more a structured display of components.
Both versions lean into colour. The Verde carries a grained green tone that is meant recall Lake Neuchâtel before a storm; the Blu is a shade of denim, brushed, and more reflective. The names do most of the talking here. The watches follow through.
Mechanics on Display
The HR01 is laid out so you can read it at a glance, even if you don’t fully understand it at first.
The flying tourbillon sits at six. The gear train runs visibly through the centre. At twelve, there’s the “wheel of time,” which reads like a focal point than the complication it is. And a function selector at two o’clock changes how the watch presents its information, while the power reserve is shown on the caseback.
It’s an open architecture, but not in the usual sense of skeletonisation for its own sake. The layout is deliberate. Components are given space. You’re invited to follow the flow of energy through the watch.
And that brings things back to the mainspring. The length isn’t a party trick. It’s the foundation for everything else.
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The Man Behind It
Von Gunten’s background runs through places like Patek Philippe and Ulysse Nardin, and he holds around thirty patents. That shows up in the details, but it doesn’t dominate the conversation when you meet him. What comes across instead is a focus on solving specific problems—how to store energy, how to release it evenly, how to make that visible without clutter. How to make it… beautiful.
This year, during Time to Watches Geneva, we managed to miss each other entirely. It happens. Schedules slip, meetings overlap, and suddenly the day is gone. So I found myself looking at the Honoris Strato through glass instead of across a table.
Not ideal, but enough to confirm that the idea still holds. The watches are built around that same central concept: long, stable power delivered from a single source, expressed in a way you can actually see.
Three Metres, More or Less
It’s easy to reduce the story to the number. 1000 hours. Forty-one days. Three metres of mainspring.
But what stays with you is the way it was explained: something you could picture. Literally. One end in your hand, the other somewhere across the room. And all of it laid out in the dial before you.
That’s the kind of detail that tends to linger, long after the fair is over and the attic has emptied out.
Final Thoughts
What makes the Honoris Strato particularly notable is not simply the watch itself, but what it represent for Stéphane von Gunten and HAUTE-RIVE as a whole. At its centre is a calibre composed of 288 components, conceived, developed, and assembled entirely within the maison’s own workshops—an ambitious undertaking for a small independent operation. But equally significant is the shift in scale. Earlier iterations of the Honoris were produced in intimate runs of just eight pieces; the Strato Blu and Verde expand that number to 88, still undeniably rare, but indicative of a manufacture beginning to move from experimental atelier to something more established and sustainable.
Even so, the watches retain the same sense of curiosity and mechanical theatre that first drew attention to von Gunten in Geneva. There remains something slightly improbable about the entire project—a watchmaker carrying around the idea of a three-metre mainspring in his pocket and building an entire maison around it—yet that is precisely what makes HAUTE-RIVE feel so compelling in a contemporary landscape increasingly dominated by caution and familiarity. The Honoris Strato was one of the most convincing pieces I saw (and didn’t see) during Watches and Wonders week this year.
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About the author
Brent Robillard is a writer, educator, craftsman, and watch enthusiast. He is the author of four novels. You can follow him on Instagram.
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