Patrick Ulm was already a watch enthusiast before he visited the Greenway Estate, a National Trust property in Devon that was once Agatha Christie’s summer home. The doyenne of murder-mystery fiction owned the house for almost 40 years, and rooms are filled with the author’s personal effects and items that inspired characters and plots in her novels. In the morning room, Patrick was drawn to a case filled with Christie’s collection of watches, particularly a fine pocket watch featuring a beautiful miniature of a young woman. He discovered it had been made by an 18th-century Swiss watchmaker called Charles Girardier.
“Charles Girardier is recognised as one of the finest pocket-watch creators of his time, with a very special style of theatrical art,” says Patrick, who decided the name of Charles Girardier should live on. In 2018, he revived the brand – and just two years later, Charles Girardier won a prestigious Grand Prix de l’Horlogerie de Genève prize for its first collection. Since then, Patrick has launched several collections and one-off pieces. Although his own background is in finance and family banking, he drew on the expertise of his cousin, a watchmaker, to create the unique timepieces that do justice to Charles Girardier’s name and legacy.
Girardier was famed for his pioneering movements and applied his love of crafts such as enamelling and portraiture on the watch faces, while his automaton-like dial animations included, for example, the appearance of deer scurrying across a dial. Many of Girardier’s signature elements were brought to life by Patrick and his team. “They inspired our own collections as we integrated these elements in our products. There is always something moving or animated on our wristwatches,” says Patrick. At the same time, the collections have revived long-lost watchmaking techniques and machinery, too.
The 1809 Tourbillon Signature Mystérieuse features hundreds of diamonds and 24-carat silver foil strips with an animated “CG” monogram, while the CG 8080 has asymmetrical hands that continuously form the figure eight in the small-seconds dial – which Patrick describes as a “riff on the theme of infinity and eternal movement”. The company has also created a one-off piece as a tribute to the artist Jackson Pollock and his famous “action paintings”, mixing enamel with metals and firing it at the watch face. “It was completely original,” says Patrick.
The latest collection, which is more contemporary while still reflecting the heritage of Girardier, is a limited edition of 100, including pieces designed exclusively for the Rolls-Royce Enthusiasts’ Club. The design is more classic and horological, maintaining the artistic craftsmanship approach. “We took the date display directly from one of the original pocket watches,” says Patrick, “but the piece is more mechanical than decorative – it gives us another area to explore, and we have other new ideas in the pipeline that are more classic but retain that sense of craftsmanship.”
It has been a strange and fascinating journey from the Greenway Estate to the pinnacle of contemporary Swiss watchmaking – a story with plot twists that Agatha Christie herself would have been proud of. For Patrick, the focus now is on continuing to build on the legacy of Charles Girardier by doing great work in his name. “That is our motivation,” he says. “We always want to do something special in honour of a great watchmaker.”
