The SP One Pavée is rendered in white gold and set with 255 diamonds. Calling the hundreds of stones subtle may sound like billionaire arithmetic, but from a distance the watch reads as sculpture first and jewellery second
For two decades, MB&F has built watches resembling spacecraft, jellyfish, and machines that might acquire consciousness after midnight. Restraint was rarely the assignment. Then, in 2025, Max Büsser’s independent manufacture produced the SP One, a 38mm dress watch that seemed almost suspiciously civilised. It was smaller and slimmer than anything the company had made, yet its movement still appeared to levitate beneath a sapphire dome.
One year later comes the SP One Pavée, rendered in white gold and set with 255 diamonds. Ordinarily, adding pavé is how a watch stops speaking and starts shouting across the restaurant. Here, remarkably, the stones do not overwhelm the idea. MB&F has covered its most elegant creation in diamonds and somehow preserved its inside voice.
It started with a sketch
The original concept began with a 2018 sketch called “Three Circles”. Its three identically sized forms represented the essentials of a mechanical watch: the mainspring barrel, the balance wheel and the dial. The project was shelved until the pandemic encouraged MB&F to revisit a basket of abandoned ideas, a collection that apparently also contained sketches for skateboards and razors.
Refined with designer Eric Giroud, Three Circles eventually became the first model in MB&F’s Special Projects family, positioned between the science-fiction theatrics of its Horological Machines and the more traditional Legacy Machines. Under the domed crystal, the barrel sits at ten o’clock, the balance performs at two, and the tilted time display occupies six. It resembles a mechanical smiley face designed by someone with a doctorate in watchmaking.
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MB&F has covered its most elegant creation in diamonds and somehow preserved its inside voice.
A sculpture first, jewellery second
The 18-carat white-gold case remains a pleasingly compact 38mm across, 12mm high and 41.9mm from lug to lug. Its rounded, bezel-free shape is closer to a polished river pebble than a conventional dress watch, with detached-looking lugs that rise from the lower case. The diamonds are applied with similar intelligence. There are 165 along the case, 55 on the sloping inner flange, 14 on the crown and 21 on the white-gold buckle, totalling 1.608 carats. Rather than placing a glittering fence around the dial, the gem-set flange behaves like theatre lighting, illuminating the mechanics it surrounds. A new dark-blue PVD time display and pale-blue calfskin strap cool the composition. Calling 255 diamonds subtle may sound like billionaire arithmetic, but from a distance the watch reads as sculpture first and jewellery second.
Unchanged mechanics
The mechanics remain unchanged, which is sensible because they were already the attraction. MB&F’s hand-wound movement contains 189 components and stores 72 hours of power, enough to survive a weekend away from the wrist. The large balance wheel beats at a leisurely 2.5Hz, making its oscillation easier to appreciate, while the open barrel offers a visual indication of the remaining power.
Conical gearing drives the inclined hours-and-minutes dial, allowing it to face the wearer instead of lying flat. From the back, rhodium-finished bridges, polished bevels, hand-finished wheels and prominent gold chatons reveal why this is more than an elaborate diamond bracelet with punctuality. The complication is not what the watch displays, merely hours and minutes, but how convincingly its working parts appear to float in an empty space.
MB&F’s hand-wound movement contains 189 components and stores 72 hours of power, enough to survive a weekend away from the wrist.
A women’s watch, really?
Priced at $104,000 (Rs 99.7 lakh) and available through MB&F retailers, the SP One Pavée is not officially limited, although the brand’s small production and existing queues make “readily available” an optimistic phrase.
There are compromises. Water resistance is just 30 metres; there is no lume, and the time display is tiny beside the mechanical spectacle. Anyone seeking practical value should leave before the champagne arrives. Yet practicality has never been MB&F’s currency. The greater achievement is that the diamonds sharpen the architecture rather than bury it, something far larger maisons routinely fail to manage. It may lean more towards jewellery than the platinum and rose-gold originals, but labelling it a women’s watch feels needlessly old-fashioned. At 38mm, it belongs to whichever wrist can carry sparkle without allowing the sparkle to do all the talking.