n reality, the story begins well before Antoine Preziuso was born in 1957. At the end of the Second World War, Giuseppe Preziuso left Italy and his native Campania, bound for Switzerland. He found work in Geneva with Kugler, a tap manufacturer, in a part of the city known as La Jonction. Giuseppe was good with his hands, becoming the factory’s best worker and a specialist in metal polishing.

Not far from there, another company, Grobéty, finished and polished cases for Rolex, and so Giuseppe went from taps to watches. Around this time, at the city’s Italian chapel, he met Federica, another émigré, this time from the north of Italy, and fell head over heels for this blue-eyed blonde. The couple set up home on Rue des Rois, still in La Jonction. It’s here that Antoine was born, in a neighbourhood of watch factories and workshops.

Guillaume Perret

Europa Star: We’re trying to understand where the desire to become a watchmaker originates. How is it passed down? If it is passed down…

Antoine Preziuso: Clearly, for me, it came from my father… and where we lived, the social environment. Dad’s work at Grobéty got him interested in watches. He set up a workshop in the basement of our building and started making watches. He was completely self-taught. He did some restoration work, too, and made jewellery. I was seven years old and used to watch him at his bench. He’d give me little jobs to do: “Take that screw out… now put it back.” I started taking bits of movements apart and building little clockwork mechanisms. He taught me how to assemble them, how to clean and oil the parts. It was also a way of keeping me busy, leaving him in peace to work on his own projects…

Laura and Florian Preziuso (enthusiastic): We remember grandpa well. There was nothing he couldn’t do with his hands. He was gifted. He was a water diviner — he could tell you exactly where you would find water, at what depth, how fast it was flowing — as well as a healer. He could cure warts, for example. He built his house in Abruzzo, in Italy, with his own two hands.

Antoine Preziuso: So really watchmaking was passed down to me naturally. It was something I soaked up on a daily basis and not in one but two ways. There was the handing-down from father to son, with dad’s story and his experience, but there was an environmental factor, too. There were dozens of workshops along the Rhône. As a kid, I’d go knocking on doors asking if there were any spare parts they could give me. I’d come home with gears, dials, bits of movements, mainplates, all kinds of stuff. I made some great discoveries.

Imagine trying to do that today! A kid would never get through the door. They’d have to scan their badge first. (laughter) Just think how many future watchmakers have been lost that way!

Antoine Preziuso: You could say that by the age of 12, I was already immersed in watchmaking. One day I knocked at a workshop and this guy came to the door, with a large Dali moustache, took one look at me and said “What do you want?” I answered in a little voice, “Please, sir, I want to be a watchmaker,” to which he replied “Finish your schooling then come back and see me.” It was Gérald Genta.

Anyway, I enrolled in technical drawing at Geneva watchmaking school. We had the same first-year curriculum as the watchmakers and I literally fell in love with the profession. I was 21 when I left, in 1979, right in the middle of the quartz revolution. All around me students were dropping out. Some managers at Patek Philippe came to the school and asked who the best students were and I was one of them, so they hired me. They put me on complications and adjustment; “cardiology” for watches. I learned a huge amount.

After work, when everyone had gone home, I’d go rummaging through drawers and find all kinds of treasures. The following morning, I’d ask the supervisor if I could make alterations to this or that movement. “Of course you can, lad.” Which is how I hand-cut the first Patek Philippe skeleton watches, which I’d take to be decorated by the engraver who lived one floor below us. That was Avedis Baghdassarian, an extraordinary man who became chief engraver at Patek Philippe. There’s even one of my skeleton watches in the Patek Philippe Museum.

But I was surrounded by these old watchmakers, counting the days until they could retire. It was depressing. I couldn’t see myself spending my life there, so I quit.

May Preziuso: That’s when we met. I was 16, he was three years older. After he left Patek Philippe, we went travelling. We did the hippie trail to India. Penniless! We rode the legendary Magic Bus home, all the way from Sri Lanka.

Guillaume Perret

And we all know travel broadens the mind, although it was a different type of learning experience that was waiting back in Geneva, through erudition and restoration.

Antoine Preziuso: I found a workshop in the same part of Geneva, still home to dozens of artisans, in 1981 and started repairing and restoring clocks and watches. One day there was a knock at the door from a certain Nathan Schmoulovitch, a leading watch expert at Galerie d’Horlogerie Ancienne, which later became Antiquorum. He was a fount of knowledge. He knew everything about everything. I was speechless. I’d never met anyone like him. It’s a shame everyone seems to have forgotten him.

That’s when I started working for Osvaldo Patrizzi and Gabriel Tortella. You had to pick your way through the piles of watches and clocks strewn across the gallery floor. Thinking about it now, it was complete madness. The entire history of horology passed through my hands. I learned it all from the inside: eras, styles, different steels, techniques, the secrets, the solutions they found… I was given movements by Jürgensen, Piguet, LeCoultre to restore. Every master watchmaker Vallée de Joux had ever seen. Museum pieces!

Knowledge is also passed down through friends and colleagues.

Antoine Preziuso: Absolutely. A kind of ecosystem was taking shape back then. Roger Dubuis had the workshop next-door to mine. He was slightly older than me, more experienced, and I was in awe of how much he knew. We became close, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t go seeking his advice. There was the compagnonnage with Franck Muller. We’d studied at the same school and would go off together, looking for old parts and watches to restore. We met François-Paul Journe at his uncle’s workshop in Paris. We were a group of young watchmakers who believed in the legacy of traditional mechanical horology and, little by little, the circle grew. We’d help each other, became better organised. Between 1982 and 1984, we were involved in a project in collaboration with Cabinotiers de Genève and some decorative artists, including an enameller, to produce an anniversary watch for the Geneva Horology Museum. Things were starting to get off the ground. We shared the same spirit of independence, the same desire to be creative and explore new paths. Then in 1985 Vincent Calabrese and Svend Andersen founded the Académie Horlogère des Créateurs Indépendants, the AHCI, that many of us would join.

Although you hadn’t yet made a watch under your own name…

Antoine Preziuso: Oh but I had! The Siena, which I put away in a drawer almost as soon as I’d finished and left it there until 1993, when I showed it on the AHCI stand at Basel. That’s when it all started. Some Japanese came to see me and orders started pouring in. The Siena got my foot on the ladder.

Guillaume Perret

This is when your career as an independent really took off. You released a succession of complication watches, worked on minute repeaters, inventing bezel winding at the same time, explored every aspect of the tourbillon, imagined completely new forms, studied a hundred different possibilities. But we’re not here to talk about your career [which has already been amply covered by Europa Star with 380 mentions in interviews, product presentations, etc. since 1993]. Returning to our theme, how did the next generation pick up the baton? Laura?

Laura Preziuso: I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t immersed in watchmaking. I’d see dad working at his bench and it was obvious that he was loving every second.

May Preziuso: It was a natural transition, simply because Antoine had a workbench at our home in the country. Now it was the children’s turn to rifle through the drawers and pull out all these little treasures.

Laura Preziuso: The door to the workshop was always open. I used to invite friends over. The things that most interested me were the objects, the materials. I have a very clear memory of a box filled with gemstones. From Sri Lanka, I think. Our parents encouraged us to be curious. They never put a damper on our dreams. One of the things I’ve inherited was their independent way of life, plus something of a rebellious streak which I still have. (laughs) We lived in the middle of the countryside, we had horses. My mother was a naturopath and she taught us what she knew. We grew up with an incredible amount of freedom, with two independent parents who were very much in love.

Guillaume Perret

What made you decide to become a jeweller?

Laura Preziuso: I had an artistic bent. I spent hours sketching and at the same time I needed to be in contact with materials; take something raw and give it shape. I also had my grandfather Giuseppe as a model. He loved to make small items of jewellery, crucifixes for the family, rings. So I enrolled in jewellery-making at the Geneva school of decorative arts. I still had my rebellious streak, I was the black sheep. And of course I was Antoine Preziuso’s daughter, so there were always suspicions of favouritism. But my case and dial won the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation competition and in 2006 I graduated top of my class. Straight away, I set up on my own as a jeweller. I definitely inherited my parents’ appetite for independence! (laughs)

I was making my own designs and subcontracting for others. Some of my jewellery incorporated mechanical elements from watches; a tourbillon inside a pendant, for example, a gem-set disk mounted on an oscillating weight or a pendant with moonphases. I had my first baby, then a second, and now teach jewellery-making at the Centre de Formation Professionnelle in Geneva. I still take commissions, I project-manage, cut decorations and, very importantly, assist my mother, May, who is the backbone of the whole enterprise.

May Preziuso: I was a naturopathy practitioner but eventually stopped so that I could give Antoine more support. It’s hard for an independent to handle both the creative and the management sides of business. We’ve been through highs and lows, from having two dozen employees to more challenging times. Life for an independent is never plain sailing. I do all the organising, the jobs a creative isn’t equipped to do. My role is to keep all the balls up in the air. It’s not always an easy task but it is vital.

Florian Preziuso: She’s our triple differential!

Something you know all about!

Florian Preziuso: True, although differential, resonance… it’s a long story.

So let’s begin at the beginning…

Florian Preziuso: How did I come to watchmaking, or how did watchmaking come to me? Well to begin with, there was a sense of wonder at the singing birds my father restored, the animated tableaux, too. I could see horology was a vast and fascinating subject. I’ve always been interested in mechanisms and motor sports, so when I was old enough to choose, I decided to study mechanics, except every time I entered the workshops, the smell of cutting oil turned my stomach, so I changed plans and in 1998 enrolled at watchmaking school, on a four-year course to become a horloger-rhabilleur. Except I was eager to start work so I switched to the horloger praticien course, which was only three years. Despite my rebellious streak, a trait I share with my sister, I also graduated top of my class.

Guillaume Perret

I didn’t want to work with my father straight away so I started job-hunting, but it was tough. People were wary of the Preziuso name, worried I might pass on their “secrets” to my father. Eventually, after a great deal of hesitation, for the reasons I just mentioned, Franck Muller hired me. I spent the first two years on chamfers and took to it really well. From there, I was given tourbillon cages to chamfer then poise. I used to make sketches and write everything I did in a notebook. One day I was told to go and show my notes to the design engineering bureau, which was headed by Enrico Barbasini and Michel Navas [both are now in charge of creation at La Fabrique du Temps, taken over by Louis Vuitton].

I was really nervous but it was all above board – I hadn’t divulged any secrets. Not long after that, they left the company and Vartan Sirmakes, the boss of Franck Muller, asked me to put together a design engineering team. I was 22 years old. There were no limits. It lasted three years and we brought out the Tourbillon Revolution 3, the world’s first tri-axial tourbillon.

Then I got a call from my father, Antoine. It was 2004. He wanted me to go and work with him. He wasn’t giving me the choice. It was now or never. He’d just taken a massive order for tourbillons.

Guillaume Perret

So it was back home and the start of a shared adventure.

Florian Preziuso: The first thing I did was set up a tourbillon workshop. We also started looking into our triple tourbillon but this was 2004 and the computers we had weren’t powerful enough. It would take us ten years to get there. No-one believed it was possible. Everyone kept telling us it was impossible to play with multiples of three, that we were wasting our time. Even so, we didn’t give up. We kept on exploring ideas, building prototype after prototype. We wanted to demonstrate that resonance isn’t a physical link or purely aerodynamics. Our three tourbillons form a triangle, connected by a differential in the centre. Even today’s most sophisticated software is incapable of simulating the differential.

May Preziuso: The differential was holding things up and there were financial obstacles, too. That’s the difference between brands that follow marketing plans, and can roll out an entire team, and independents such as us who follow our instincts, without much in the way of resources.

Antoine Preziuso: This was all happening during the 2008 financial crisis. We had to lay off staff, but we made sure everyone found a new job. 2009 was a really slow year. We survived thanks to the boutique in Geneva, but we were targeted three times by armed robbers. The last robbery, in 2011, brought us to our knees.

May Preziuso: We were really down. We closed the workshop and took ourselves off on a trip to Australia…

Florian Preziuso: Meanwhile, I set up on my own. I was doing restoration work, specialising in development, learning to use the latest software. I was still slogging away on our triple tourbillon and I finally came up with the solution, which was the differential.

Antoine Preziuso: The differential, of course! We couldn’t believe it when Florian called us in Australia, just three months after leaving for the other side of the world. “Mum, dad, that’s it, I found the solution!” So we came back and we said let’s do it, let’s make that triple tourbillon. But making it happen proved one heck of a challenge.

In 2015 you won the GPHG Innovation Prize and Public Prize for your Tourbillon of Tourbillons - TTR3 Résonance. Father and son on stage together to collect the awards…

Antoine Preziusio: The award gave us the boost we needed. We’ve been talking about how something can be passed on and this is a great example. Plus it goes both ways.

The Tourbillon of Tourbillons - TTR3 Résonance

And now?

Everyone: We’re currently in another transitional period. We’re still working together as a family but without any pressure. We don’t have investors to please, we don’t have any debts. We take our time and stay humble. We’re not marketing ourselves but we are gradually returning to the spotlight. This year we’re celebrating 10 years of the triple tourbillon, so we’ll be presenting an incredible piece at the 2025 Time To Watches exhibition in Geneva. And the next generation is growing up fast… Our story doesn’t end here.

The next generation: Antoine and May’s grandsons, Evan and Sohan, age 5 and already at the workbench.

Lenny Preziuso, age 11, the new brand ambassador.