By Brent Robillard

Audacity and poetry

At the age of eighteen, Alexandre Beauregard once contemplated destroying one of Beethoven’s six remaining pianos—harvesting its ebony to turn into watches.

“It’s an idea that still haunts me,” he says now, smiling, as if aware of the audacity and the poetry of the thought in equal measure.

It is a strangely perfect entry point into Beauregard’s mind. For him, material is never just material. It carries memory. History. A life lived before it reaches his hands. Wood, stone, metal—everything has already been something else. The watch is simply the next chapter in its story.

Portrait of Alexandre Beauregard — Alexandre Beauregard @calibre321

An atelier in Ville-Marie

We meet in Ville-Marie, in that restless seam of Montréal where old brick buildings press up against glass towers, where the city’s past and present coexist in constant negotiation. Beauregard’s workshop occupies a floor above the commercial laundry run by his wife. The apartment he and his brothers built sits just next to that—home and atelier vertically integrated. Life and work inseparable by design.

After an afternoon in the workshop, my wife and I settle into the kitchen Beauregard designed himself. As we grill him with questions, he prepares steak frites. His wife and daughter, move easily around the space with the practiced choreography of family life. His son is off studying Russian in St. Petersburg. Beside the sink, a sticky note lists the weekly dish rota. Sundays are Beauregard’s turn. Today is Thursday. There is wine. Plenty of it. The conversation stretches.

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The early years

Beauregard grew up in a tough neighbourhood in north Montréal, one of three brothers born within three years of one another. The household was lower middle class. His mother, a teacher, worked relentlessly to keep things afloat. His father was involved in the early days of Cirque du Soleil and was often away.

“The boys left the house in the morning and came back at dusk,” Beauregard recalls. “We were restless.”

To preserve her sanity, their mother enrolled them in every sport imaginable. Beauregard competed at the provincial level in figure skating. He swam. He became a ski instructor. He played hockey seriously. Soccer too. Motion, discipline, exhaustion—these became constants.

Yet alongside the physicality ran a quieter obsession.

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“I started drawing before I could talk,” he says. His parents kept those early drawings. Proof, perhaps, that the creative impulse was always there, waiting for a medium.

Eventually, Beauregard attended an alternative arts school—one of the first of its kind in Montréal—where there were no grades, no report cards.

“This was a good thing,” he says, without hesitation. “Traditional school was not for me. We all begin life as entrepreneurs. School breaks us.”

For a time, he imagined a future in cinema. Life intervened, as it tends to. Today, when asked what he does, Beauregard answers simply: “Anything I want.”

3D CAD drawings of the Ulysse — Detailed blueprints for the Ulysse @calibre321

A partner in crime

He met his wife at eighteen. “That is part of my success,” he says. “When you’re with the same partner for this long, you are able to build.”

Choosing to become a watchmaker in Canada—let alone Montréal—was never a sensible career move.

“I had discovered a true partner for my madness,” Beauregard says of his wife.

For years, the dream of watchmaking remained in the background as life filled with responsibilities. Marriage. Children. Work. But obsession has a way of demanding attention. “I am passionate to the point of sickness,” he admits.

There came a period when he stopped sleeping properly. Stopped eating properly. He would take the métro downtown to La Presse and buy every watch magazine he could find, devouring them late into the night. Drawing. Designing. Obsessing.

It was his wife who finally pushed him forward. “She told me to go. To follow the dream.”

The dream becomes reality

So he packed a backpack and went to Switzerland, arriving at EPHG—Environnement Professionnel Horlogerie-Joaillerie—the country’s largest annual trade show dedicated to high-precision watchmaking and jewellery. It is a place where suppliers, artisans, and independent makers shape the industry from behind the scenes.

He knocked on doors. Made contacts. Asked questions. Absorbed everything.

Back in Montréal, Beauregard bought a license for SolidWorks and taught himself 3D CAD design. He discovered wax casting. He learned how to polish metal properly. Prototype after prototype followed. The dial for the Ulysse would eventually go through seventeen iterations before it was right.

“I’ve been told all my life that I’m talented,” he says. “But honestly, talent is just hard work. If you do something over and over again for long enough, you become good at it.”

Lily Bouton watch — Lili Bouton @calibre321

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Yves St. Pierre

A pivotal moment came through an introduction to Yves St-Pierre, one of Québec’s most respected lapidary artists and a longtime instructor at Montréal’s École de joaillerie—a public institution dedicated to preserving traditional jewellery and stone-setting crafts. St-Pierre’s career spans more than five decades of working with hard stone, precious materials, and artisanal finishing.

Together, they travelled to the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show—an annual pilgrimage site for gem dealers, lapidaries, collectors, and jewellers from around the world. Tucson is not just a trade show; it is an ecosystem of stone, where raw material meets possibility.

“It was a moment of revelation,” Beauregard says.

He has returned every year since.

Under St-Pierre’s mentorship, Beauregard learned lapidary work firsthand. The shaping, cutting, polishing, and setting of stone became central to his design language. Even now, St-Pierre comes by on weekends after teaching, often staying the night. They work in the studio. They eat with the family.

“Yves has been working stone for more than fifty years,” Beauregard laughs. “But I keep him young, because I have a lot of dumb ideas he has to help me resolve.”

Lapidary artist examining gemstones — Lapidary artist @calibre321

The women’s collections

This relationship is written into Beauregard’s early collections for women—timepieces that sit at the intersection of watchmaking and high jewellery. The Dahlia, Lily, Lili Bouton, and Lily Candy collections are not simply variations on a theme, but explorations of texture, colour, and material. Hard stones—malachite, lapis lazuli, aventurine, mother-of-pearl—are not decorative afterthoughts here. They are structural elements of the design, often integrated into cases and dials in ways that defy conventional watchmaking logic.

These watches feel less like products and more like objets d’art—wearable sculptures that happen to tell time. The techniques required to produce them are rare, labour-intensive, and deeply manual. It is work that resists scale by its very nature.

Dahlia Fire Opal watch — Dahlia Fire Opal @calibre321

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The GPHG

“The fact that I am an outsider,” Beauregard reflects, “that I am not from Switzerland, that I am not formally trained—that is an advantage. Because I don’t know what I can’t do. So I do it.”

Beauregard’s rise has often been framed as luck. But luck, as ever, seems to find those already working when it arrives. On the day we visit, he has been in the studio since 3:30 a.m. Did I mention that this was also his birthday? True story.

His watches have been selected for the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève three times—no small feat for an independent atelier operating far from the gravitational centre of Swiss watchmaking. The GPHG is often described as the Oscars of the watch world. The attention is validating. It is also distracting.

“As a microbrand, as an independent, the attention can be a curse,” Beauregard says. “I don’t want to make a thousand watches a year.”

The dial of the Ulysse watch — Crafting the dial for the Ulysse @calibre321

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Vianney Halter and the Ulysse

But while fame is a double-edged sword, it can also be dizzying.

Not unlike the release of Ulysse—his first collection for men. For Ulysse, “the response from the market was unlike anything we had ever experienced,” reflects Beauregard. The Ulysse was a collaboration with Master Watchmaker Vianney Halter–an haute joaillerie dial in aqua marine with an 18k rose gold case and a Vianney Halter mysterious winding movement, limited to 10 pieces.

Every moment spent working with Halter was time spent making memories, says Beauregard. “He is a mad man, but so am I. It’s like meeting a twin.”

This spring, Beauregard will launch the second iteration of his Ulysse alongside another collection for men, he calls Lupin.

Beauregard working in his studio — Beauregard at work @calibre321

The human adventure

However, as a result of the last 18 months, his 4000-square foot studio required a complete overhaul to keep up with demand—transforming the space into eight distinct workshops dedicated to rough work, polishing, assembly, and finishing. Light pours in through massive windows that line two exterior walls. For now, his only constant companion is Jérémie Aubry-Regnier, with whom he has worked for five years. Together, they produced thirty-two watches last year. Ambitious plans aim for fifty to sixty this year, one hundred by 2027, and perhaps two hundred by 2028.

This will require new hands. Years of training. “The process can be overwhelming to someone who has not grown alongside us.”

But growth, he insists, is not the metric that matters.

“Success is an adventure,” Beauregard says, glancing toward the kitchen where his daughter works in tandem with her mother. “It’s time spent with my wife and kids. The watch adventure is a human adventure. It’s about friendship. Success is those moments spent with like-minded people. It’s like your life takes a deep breath and it just expands.”

Downstairs, the industrial dryers are quiet in the family laundry. Upstairs, the tools wait patiently at the workbenches. Somewhere between the two, Beauregard is building watches that feel less like commodities and more like heirlooms in waiting—objects made not only to mark time, but to remember it.

And, for the record, the steak frites was excellent. We sang Happy Birthday over his wife’s tiramisu.