Cover Richard Mille treats gem-setting with the same rigour as its calibres, milling every stone cavity to the exact dimensions of an individual gem (Photo: courtesy of Richard Mille)
Richard Mille treats gem-setting with the same rigour as its calibres, milling every stone cavity to the exact dimensions of an individual gem (Photo: courtesy of Richard Mille)
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From the RM 007 in 2005 to this year’s RM HJ-02, Richard Mille has turned gem- setting into a discipline built on micron-level precision and Cécile Guenat’s design era
Richard Mille positions gem-setting as an engineering discipline, not a decorative afterthought. The distinction matters, as more women buyers are asking for calibre complexity and case architecture equal to “men’s” models, rather than a smaller or simplified version of them, while still wanting something that reads as jewellery.
The brand’s gem-setting work began in 2005 with the RM 007, its first application of bead-setting and invisible-setting techniques. Since then, the workshop has extended these techniques to Richard Mille’s signature technical materials— Carbon TPT, sapphire and ceramic—which behave differently from gold or platinum under a setter’s tools.
Precision is one of the main goals. Each stone cavity is milled to the exact dimensions of an individual gem before any claw
is set. Gold cases are cut on a computer-controlled CNC machine; sapphire cases are cut with a laser, to tolerances of around one micron. Richard Mille has also carried stone into the movement itself—not for the mechanical role stones usually play in watchmaking, where synthetic rubies are set at pivot points to reduce friction and wear, but rather for aesthetic and collaborative reasons.
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Above Cécile Guenat (Photo: courtesy of Richard Mille)
Cécile Guenat (Photo: courtesy of Richard Mille)
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The RM 018 Tourbillon Boucheron, developed over four years and released in 2008 to mark Boucheron’s 150th anniversary, used stone to form the calibre’s gear wheels. Richard Mille built the case and movement, while Boucheron selected and set the stones, producing a limited edition of 30 totally unique pieces; given the hand-finishing involved, only five could be produced per year.
In 2009, the RM 019 Tourbillon went further, with its entire movement baseplate carved from a single piece of black onyx—a
deliberate move towards what Richard Mille called a more emotional, feminine design language for its ladies’ collection. The
baseplate is worked into a Celtic triskelion motif in three dimensions, with a small onyx triskelion on the caseback that turns in time with the tourbillon.
Richard Mille opened a dedicated in-house gem-setting workshop in June 2019, and behind many of its initiatives is Cécile Guenat. She joined Richard Mille in 2015 and was appointed creative and development director in April 2018. Her first project for Richard Mille was the exterior design of the RM 71-01 Tourbillon Talisman, the brand’s first in-house automatic tourbillon calibre, released in 2018 as an edition of ten pieces. The Bonbon Collection followed later that year, presented at the Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie in Geneva. The RM 07-02 Sapphire Automatic, with a case made entirely of pink sapphire, came in 2015.
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Above RM HJ 02 (Photo: courtesy of Richard Mille)
RM HJ 02 (Photo: courtesy of Richard Mille)
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The RM HJ-01, released in 2020 as the first in Richard Mille’s haute joaillerie line, comprises four unique tonneau-case pieces set with ruby, blue sapphire, violet sapphire and emerald, using bezel-, bead- and snow-setting techniques. Its follow-up, the RM HJ-02, arrived this year as a larger collection of 12 unique timepieces across four colourways. The case took more than a year to develop, breaking the tonneau shape into asymmetrical, layered planes rather than the single continuous curve of its predecessor. Each watch carries 1,399 precious and ornamental stones—among them diamonds, rubies, Paraíba tourmalines, chrysoprase and mother of pearl—set using snow, grain and bezel techniques chosen to direct how light and colour move across the case. The gem-setting alone takes nearly 700 hours per watch. The same treatment reaches the new in-house CRMT2 calibre: its white gold baseplate, bridges and rotor are all gem-set, the rotor itself turning on ceramic ball bearings.
The progression—from the RM 018’s stone gear wheels and the RM 019’s onyx baseplate to the RM HJ-02’s gem-set baseplate and rotor today—is what Richard Mille means when it describes stones as structural elements of the watch: as crucial to the finished piece as case design, materials and calibre architecture, not decoration applied once the engineering is done. The
RM HJ-02’s rotor makes the point plainly: fully set with stones, it still winds the watch as it swings on the wearer’s wrist, unaffected by the gems covering it.
As the Regional Editor for Watches and Jewellery and Editorial Content Lead for Tatler GMT, Amrita Katara specialises in luxury watch and jewellery coverage across Asia, with expertise in editorial strategy, feature writing and interviews with industry leaders. Her past roles span luxury lifestyle media and client partnerships. Based in Mumbai, Amrita’s work bridges global trends and Asian market insights.
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