It took me two meetings and one oversized demonstration model to fully understand the energy recovery mechanism at the heart of Renaud Tixier’s Monday. Dominique Renaud co-founded Renaud & Papi with Giulio Papi in 1986, the complications house Audemars Piguet, Richard Mille, IWC, Jaeger-LeCoultre and A. Lange & Söhne have all turned to when they needed a mechanism beyond their own workshops. His latest venture pairs him with Julien Tixier, a watchmaker and prototypist in his early thirties who cut his teeth building prototypes for Laurent Ferrier before setting up alone in the Vallée de Joux, and who has an obsession with hand finishing that borders on the unreasonable. Together they launched the Monday in 2024 and, according to the brand, every piece the workshop could build has already been spoken for.
The micro-rotor has always been a compromise. It keeps a movement slim and leaves the view of the calibre unobstructed, but its small mass means it winds less efficiently than a full rotor and stalls more easily when your wrist stops moving. Renaud’s answer, borrowed from the energy recovery systems of the motor industry and shrunk to the scale of a wristwatch, was to use the one space in a micro-rotor that is always empty: its central hub. Inside the platinum rotor of the Monday sits a second, smaller platinum flywheel coupled to a spring. When the rotor swings and stops, the flywheel’s own inertia carries it on, loading the spring. The spring then releases and kicks the rotor back into motion, so the tiny movements of daily wear that would never budge a conventional micro-rotor are harvested as winding energy instead of lost. The same assembly doubles as shock protection: under a hard knock, a declutching mechanism disengages the flywheel from its arbor so it can move freely, then re-engages once the shock has passed. That free, oscillating motion is why the workshop calls it the dancer. The brand told me the result is a micro-rotor around 40 per cent more efficient than a standard one, and the practical upshot in this new calibre is a power reserve of at least 72 hours, up from 60 in the original.
The Monday Skeleton is the third concept to be built around that idea. The first was the original Monday, with its minimalist grey dial. The second was the Monday Organica, launched last year with a Rorschach test of a translucent blue enamel dial by Ateliers Olivier Vaucher and since joined by Black and Bordeaux editions, each a run of seven. This one strips the dial away to reveal the unconventional layout of the movement, now designated RVI2025, with 262 components, every one of them finished and decorated by hand in the workshop in Tolochenaz. Tixier’s signature is the hand-cut inward angle, and there are 238 of them here, alongside anglage, black polishing, bridge rounding, Côtes de Genève, sunray brushing and circular graining. Turn it over and the barrel ratchet is covered by a decorative bridge, hand engraved, chased and filled with grand feu enamel matched to the colour of the watch. The caseback is also where you get the clearest view of the dancer at work.
From the front, the skeletonisation gives the watch a harder, more technical character than the dial versions. A brushed rehaut carries faceted appliques on its lower level and a white minute track above, the dauphine-style hour and minute hands are skeletonised, polished and satin finished, and the small seconds at 3 o’clock gets a satin-finished counter in either petrol blue or green. The same colour runs through to a hand-stitched alligator strap. The case is the familiar 40.8mm in 18ct white gold with hand-engraved frosted flanks, 12.6mm thick with its domed crystal. Each colour is limited to 15 pieces.
What makes this release interesting is that it was never meant to happen. Renaud Tixier was conceived as a series of seven watches, each built around an idea the industry has not seen before and each named after a day of the week. Monday was supposed to be one chapter, with Tuesday to follow. Talking to CEO Michel Nieto, who speaks considerably better English than I do French, it became clear that once Renaud gets going on an idea, he cannot stop. It is telling that the first of his seven was about recovering energy and squeezing more out of a mainspring. The Monday Skeleton suggests there is more to come from this one before we ever get to Tuesday.
Price and Specs:
More details at Renaud Tixier.
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