Bovet Récital 12 Malachite & Tiger’s Eye Unveiled

Reading Time: 5 minutes

There are certain moments in watchmaking when a maison takes a familiar piece from its repertoire and elevates it in a way that both surprises and delights collectors. With the new Récital 12 Stone Dial editions, Bovet has chosen a path that embraces the organic charm of natural materials and aligns it with the unmistakable refinement of its technical savoir-faire. This time, Bovet dresses the Récital 12 in dials of malachite and tiger’s eye, turning an already quietly distinguished piece into a poetic meditation on time, nature, and craft.

Stone dials come in cycles of desirability. Piaget, Cartier, and Rolex experimented extensively with them in the 1970s, producing highly collectible malachite, lapis, tiger’s eye, and onyx dials that today command strong premiums thanks to their rarity and fragile nature. Their difficulty lies in machining: each ultra-thin slice must avoid fracture, and once polished and reinforced, it retains a fragility alien to metal or enamel. By selecting malachite and tiger’s eye, Bovet is not just reviving a retro flourish, it is reaffirming continuity with high-craft Swiss watchmaking of the mid-20th century, but filtered through its own modern vocabulary. To a collector, the resonance here is clear: the Récital 12 becomes Bovet’s quiet allusion to vintage stone-dial elegance, paired with the weight and modernity of in-house movement and construction.

Bovet Récital 12 Malachite & Tiger’s Eye

Earth’s Signature on the Wrist

To speak of these dials is to acknowledge that no image, no technical drawing can anticipate their final form. Malachite, with its hypnotic green strata, evokes the deep forests of the Jura region surrounding Bovet’s Château de Môtiers, verdant slopes that undoubtedly inspired Pascal Raffy’s decision to integrate this mineral into the collection. Each slice of malachite is cut thin, reinforced, and coaxed into revealing its swirling concentric patterns. Under light, the dial seems alive, like the echo of geological time crystallised on the wrist.

Tiger’s Eye presents an entirely different character, one of movement and warmth. Its chatoyant stripes shimmer with a golden-brown lustre that shifts as the watch tilts in the hand, the surface flashing bands of copper and shadow. This play of light is not optical artifice but a natural dance of fibrous crystal growth. It is hypnotic, rooted in the earth yet ethereal, an aesthetic that refuses to be standardised, ensuring every timepiece has its own unique signature. On either dial, the drama of the natural stone is anchored by an offset guilloché sub-dial for the hours and minutes, and the running seconds, elegantly poised over the exposed gear train, adds dynamism.

Power and Precision Inverted

Turning from aesthetics to mechanics, the Récital 12 introduces a freshly designed hand-wound calibre, the 13BMDR12C2, a manufacture movement executed without compromise. Measuring 31 mm in diameter and a mere 4 mm in height, it ingeniously balances thinness with stamina, offering seven full days of autonomy from a single barrel, something Bovet has made its calling card in an era when too many movements settle for 48 hours.

Inverted for the pleasure of the eye, the movement reveals its in-house balance wheel, shaped and polished with unwavering exactitude. The visual openness allows not just a glimpse of the gear train but an appreciation of its architecture, as every bridge and wheel declares the intervention of artisanal hands. The 227 components are not hidden; they are displayed in dialogue with the natural patterns of stone, a juxtaposition of mechanical strictness and mineral unpredictability. Fire-blued steel hands on the running seconds provide an accent of traditional Swiss artisanry, while the hand-finishing across the calibre, polished bevels, perlage and satin brushing in measured dialogue, reaffirms Bovet’s status as one of the rare maisons capable of producing its regulating organs in-house, right down to the hairspring.

A Titanium Sculpture for Daily Life

If the dial speaks of natural beauty and the movement of mechanical elegance, the case speaks of ergonomics and contemporary comfort. Rendered in Grade 5 titanium, the Dimier case of the Récital 12 spans 40mm across and measures less than 10mm in thickness, making it remarkably svelte for a watch of such presence. Highly polished surfaces give it a quiet radiance, contrasting beautifully against the vibrant stones on the dial. The sapphire exhibition caseback completes the transparent dialogue between inner workings and outer form, while 30 metres of water resistance gives a measure of reassurance for daily wear.

Bovet delivers the Récital 12 on a titanium bracelet, itself a sculpture of fluid angles and polished-matte contrasts. The folding clasp, discreetly complex, allows up to three millimetres of micro-adjustment to adapt to the swelling and contracting of the wrist throughout the day. A hidden delight lies in the design of that clasp: when closed, the paired “V”s of Bovet’s initial align as an infinity symbol, a quiet nod to the maison’s philosophy of timeless continuity.

Stone, Metal, and Spirit

The Récital 12 Stone Dial editions are limited to sixty examples each, in both malachite and tiger’s eye. That scarcity is not contrived but inevitable when the material itself resists duplication. In its integration of natural stone, an inverted and finely decorated calibre, and the grace of titanium both in case and bracelet, Bovet presents a timepiece that is at once luxurious and deeply personal.

To own such a piece is less to wear a watch and more to carry a fragment of the earth itself, animated by human ingenuity and patience. It is a conversation between geology and horology, permanence and passing time, restraint and splendour. With this release, Bovet demonstrates that the “Good Life” it so frequently evokes is not an empty slogan, but an ethos made tangible with every glance at the wrist.

Collectors already accustomed to the boldness of Bovet will see the Récital 12 as one of the most wearable gateways into the maison’s universe – still artistic, still rare, yet far less theatrical than tourbillons or painted dials. Compared to houses like Piaget, which continues to master stone dials but no longer makes movements to be explored, Bovet combines what Piaget once represented (stone artistry) with full-blown visible haute horlogerie mechanics. Against Cartier, which also dips into stone occasionally, Bovet offers exclusivity and independence Cartier cannot. And against Rolex’s vintage malachite and tiger’s eye Day-Dates, Bovet responds by saying: yes, but here is a seven-day calibre built in-house with inverted display.

In an era when the market is crowded with steel sports models and integrated bracelet references, Bovet has decided to look to the earth itself for inspiration. And by doing so, it offers collectors not the déjà vu of another Genta-inspired shape, but a genuinely different proposition: a watch where every dial is a geological fingerprint, animated by a calibre few others could design and finish. This is a Bovet whose charm is not shouted, but whispered, meant for those who care less about being recognised at a distance and more about meditating on what sits before their eyes.