Interview: PS Horology’s Peter Speake is Still a Romantic About Watchmaking

Independent watchmaking is in a vastly different place than it was when legendary English watchmaker Peter Speake founded the Speake-Marin brand in 2002. While it might be a stretch to say indie watchmaking has gone fully mainstream, it’s certainly on its way–and Speake has seen that evolution from the ground floor. The work Speake did with the Speake-Marin brand was undeniably influential. While Speake-Marin’s offerings were innovative, often highly technical, and decidedly modern in aesthetics, they embodied the kind of old world craftsmanship that this sector of watchmaking obsesses over. Perhaps more importantly, many of the pieces Speake-Marin crafted with Speake at the helm were some of the first to really push the concept of watches with a narrative. They played in the space between function and art with their designs, and did so boldly. That period of his career turned Speake into something of a hero of independent watchmaking. Speake departed the Speake-Marin brand in 2017, at which point he founded an education platform called the Naked Watchmaker. With the Naked Watchmaker, Speake–whose early watchmaking background was in restoration and historical preservation–spent several years immersed in the inner workings of everything from the great mainstream brands to original Breguet tourbillions. Though he dabbled in consultancy throughout it all, it was unclear if he would return full-time to the creative and retail side of watchmaking. With his new brand, PS Horology, one of independent watchmaking’s greats has returned, thanks in part to a request from an old friend and client. The trio of limited edition watches that make up PS Horology’s debut Tsuba line are an aesthetic departure from those he created in the Speake-Marin days, but they retain the immense creativity and narrative concepts that have become the bedrock of Speake’s work. These watches look unlike anything else on the market right now and draw on far flung influences including Japanese katanas, bronze-age Vietnamese civilizations, early English marine chronometers, and Arabian astronomy. They are adventurous, yet mature and balanced, and a reminder of just how good Peter Speake is at crafting something unique. Following the debut of the PS Horology brand, Worn & Wound sought an audience with Peter Speake, who brought us inside his new line of watches, looked back at the decade that’s passed since he left Speake-Marin, and explained just what brought him back to the bench. DVB: I understand you were touring a new workspace today? Peter Speake: Yeah! I’ve got a new project based in London. It’s a passion project that I’ve wanted to realize for 35 years and first started thinking about right when I finished studying, so it’s like a bookend to my career in a way. Everything is coinciding to bring me back to the UK; it’s been quite surreal, but wonderful at the same time. Based on your early days in watchmaking, would it be safe to assume this new project has something to do with restoration work or historical preservation? So between 1989 and 1996, I worked restoring antique English pocket watches, watches from Frodsham, Smith, and Dent, watchmakers that started in the mid-19th century and carried on to the first part of the 20th century. They often had movements made for them by a company called Nicole, Nielsen & Co which was based in London. I always loved those designs and I came up with a concept a few years ago that was inspired by certain characteristics of those early calibers, and executing that concept is finally happening. It’s not what I would call a commercial business, more something I’ve always wanted to do. I’ll only produce just one or two pieces a year and the first ones have already been committed to. But yes, it goes back to my love of pocket watches and restoration work where I first fell in love with horology. What about that period of movement design do you find so attractive? Are these going to be tribute pieces or something that elaborates on those designs? I feel like you’re always strived to do something progressive with your movement design. Thank you! Stylistically, these watches are inspired by Nicole, Nielsen & Co and the strength of the calibers that they used to make. These watches aren’t mimicries or replicas, but they take inspiration and reinterpret it in ways that makes the movements mine. We’re all still ultimately inspired by other people and periods in watchmaking, but that inspiration is synthesized within you and what comes back out is always going to have part of you in it. I think when it’s authentic, you get a feeling for the watchmaker that was behind the piece, and that can come from design aesthetics all the way through to the mechanics of a caliber. Nicole/Nielsen made things that were strong. English watchmakers in that period made pieces that were sublimely beautiful, especially so given the lack of CAD and CNC and technologies that we have today. Early English watchmakers really worked with a philosophy of zero compromise, and that made those pieces special. That philosophy is also why the English watchmaking industry died. They didn’t industrialize or change with the times; the Swiss learned from the Americans and the English basically said “No, we’re gonna do it the way we always did,” and it didn’t work. You used the term authentic and I think interpreting the personality of a watchmaker through their work is a huge part of the fun of collecting. For those that may not be as familiar with your work, can you point out some examples of where your own personality has been expressed through your designs over the years? I recently collated a library of everything that I did with my old brand, everything from art pieces, enameling, engraving, guilloche, to minute repeaters and tourbillons. When I looked back at all of that stuff that I did, there were elements of my DNA that you just found everywhere, from case designs to rotors to handsets. There was always something that I could point to as my own and even though it has been 10 years since I left [Speake-Marin] and the brand has changed dramatically, there are still elements there that they’ve retained from 20 plus years ago when I actually started making those watches. If you look at somebody like Romain Gauthier, there are certain simple things like the very unusual screws he uses or, on a larger scale, the quality of finishing that goes all the way through his stuff, which is fantastic. With the pieces that I make in the future, it’s a reinvention. My touch has become more subtle. It’s changing and maybe becoming more sophisticated. A decade away from the Speake-Marin brand is substantial. How does it feel looking back at that period of your career now, and did the process of collating that library change your perspective on it? When I look back, what I’m dumbfounded by is just the sheer volume of work that I actually did. I worked on Speake-Marin for just under 14 years and with the clarity of being able to actually take a step back and look at it all, I just don’t know how we managed to execute so much. It was phenomenal. Very few of the pieces were commissions and most of it was made just through my desire to reinvent things in the way that I wanted them to be made. Sometimes it was very conservative and classical, sometimes it was more flamboyant and really off the wall. So looking back at that as a collected work makes it feel like it was 100 years ago and I honestly don’t know how we managed to do so much. Perhaps it was down to youth, enthusiasm, and a degree of hunger to develop a brand. That process has changed today. To develop a brand back then, you needed to have novelty. You needed to have new things to get visibility and people talking about you. That really fueled my creativity because it gave me what I truly wanted, which was to come out with new things. When I look at it there are also things I’m not particularly proud of, but that’s part of the process. I also look at some of the stuff and I think it still stands up. It’s become, to my eyes, classical in a way. I know that some of those pieces sell very well today, and have increased in value and it’s very flattering to see people investing more money in work that you made 20 years ago than it was worth when I first sold it. Could you have imagined back then that the interest in independent watchmaking would flourish in the way it has, with young celebrities sporting insider independent watches? It was inevitable that more and more people were going to get involved in that side of the business because the actual manufacturing aspect became more straightforward. The ability to communicate has changed and while there’s more noise out there than there ever has been before, you can create the noise in a way that you couldn’t have 20 years ago. You don’t have to travel around the world repeatedly to contact people to show them what you actually do as a watchmaker. In relation to the interest that has developed around independents as a whole, I think that’s really a result of everybody from partly myself in a small way, but more importantly, people like Max Bussier, Francois-Paul Journe, DeBethune, and all of those early guys working their asses off nonstop to share what they do, but also to educate people on this kind of watchmaking. I actually think that when it comes to independent watchmaking, there is far more demand than there is supply right now, which is good and bad. It’s been interesting to see the diversity that’s cropped up in the last couple years. It seems like people are really stretching to innovate again and finding success with progressive ideas. I think they have to. At one time there weren’t enough, but with more and more younger brands developing, they really need to have a voice and a narrative. They have to come up with things that go beyond just being high quality or handmade; there has to be an angle that makes them innovative and interesting for collectors. I think the bar is also being lifted with all of the new young watchmakers. I walked around the Carrée d’Horlogerie at Watches & Wonders this year, and I hadn’t done that for a long time, and I was actually quite impressed by the amount of pieces that were slimmer, more sophisticated, and more complex. The quality level is rising. What are your hopes for the PS Horology brand? Why start another brand after so many years doing other things within watchmaking? One of them is that my ex-partner and I developed a little education platform called The Naked Watchmaker, and I was doing that for around 5 years, which was quite wonderful. We would go into so many different watch houses and see how they function, and take apart and photograph everything from MB&F to original Breguet tourbillon pocket watches. That experience was extraordinary and it alleviated all the pressure that I had been under when I was a commercial watchmaker. When that project came to a conclusion, I still needed to make a living and I had some friends in Vietnam who asked me to make some watches for them. So I designed a watch and the watch required a brand, so PS Horology was really born from that. At the time, enough time had passed for me to want to get back into that creative domain. It all just kind of happened and I didn’t have any fixed plan. Did you ever consider leaving the creative side of the business altogether to stay in education or consultancy? No. Consultancy is actually quite rewarding for me, and I like the people aspect of it. But you’re always helping other people, which is the service that you’re providing. You don’t make final decisions. When you own your own brand and make your own products, you may be influenced by the market, but you ultimately do what you want to do, and there’s incredible freedom for that. And it is a creative domain, and I strive to do things which are original. For example, PS Horology’s Tsuba watch’s design was influenced by a tsuba on a katana, which is the hand protection between the blade and the hand grip. It’s the first time anything like that was really made. That watch’s case and bracelet design and the tsuba influence actually came from Darren Jones, who is a very old friend, but when you take an idea and make it into metal, it’s an incredible high. I get a real buzz from that and I missed that. It’s the reason why I do what I do, and ultimately, that’s what I’m trained to do. I’m a watchmaker. I wasn’t trained as a consultant–that’s something that you learn along the way. I wasn’t trained as a designer and there are people who are better designers than I am. What I do is I execute things the way I see that they should be, rather than the way a brand needs a product to be made, if that makes sense. The three models in the PS Horology debut line were all inspired by culture outside of horology itself. Can you tell me more about the genesis of these new watches? The Tsuba Dong Son was the first one and was really a direct request from old friends and clients in Vietnam. Those watches were linked to the Dong Son drum, which is a very important cultural element in Vietnam. The Tsuba Blue is the one which is most representative of myself; the style, the indices, the blue being used as not just a color, but as an echo with the blue screws and blued hands, which are all of the elements that you’d find in early English marine chronometers. It’s subtle, but it means something to me and there won’t be a Tsuba White or Tsuba Red or anything. The Tsuba Blue exists because of the history associated with it and its connection to early English pocketwatches and marine chronometers. The Suhail is literally the same overall design as the Tsuba Blue, but the dial is made of gold instead of sapphire and that was linked with the stars and the desert–all influenced purely by the color of the gold in the center. That watch was a request from another dear friend who opened up a retail shop in Riyadh. He wanted something that was associated with his culture and working with that gold and its texture was the way I accomplished that. I’ve actually handed the PS Horology project over to my wife, Farhana Safa, who was a car designer. The next pieces are being designed by her. I put in place all the technical aspects and I dictate the quality of the pieces, and I work with the company in La Chaux-de-Fonds that does all of the final assembly, but the pieces that you’ll see in the future from PS Horlogy, while being my ideas and concepts, will actually be designed by my wife and her team. So in the coming years, you’ll see a whole diversification of different pieces which have interesting narratives, which are linked to different countries and different cultures. It will remain a small operation, but some of the first designs for the next series are the most beautiful of their type that I’ve seen. I can’t tell you what they are yet, but I believe what we’re making is really quite extraordinary. Would this be your first time collaborating with Farhana? These next PS Horology pieces will be the very first time we’ve worked together. She was working for a different design consultancy company in London and prior to that, she was working for Land Rover, and she was an ophthalmologist for many years prior to that. The more she got to understand what I did, the more she got pulled into it. The beauty of watchmaking is that you have this combination of precision and aesthetics, and that’s her. She has the precision and mechanics from both her medical career and her car career, and a deep love of aesthetics and creativity. I was blown away when I saw what she had done with these watch designs. As someone that’s collaborated with a lot of hugely creative people on a high level, what’s needed for a successful collaborator? First of all, you’ve got to get rid of ego because that impedes everybody. Ultimately, you have to work with people with whom you have mutual respect; I don’t think there’s any other way to do it effectively or successfully. I also think when you are open to listening to other people’s creativity and other people’s knowledge–whether that’s technical or aesthetic–then you can play table tennis with ideas. You end up with something that you could almost never do on your own that way. If you’re not flexible or open, then you limit yourself. And to give you an example of how that worked when I collaborated with Schwarz Etienne, I made a lot of designs and then we went down the direction of Tsuba Blue, which was always the root of what I had designed for them. I worked with their team, who would make suggestions on how we could twist that design to make it look better, or how we could use different technologies to execute it better. That kind of interplay is especially important in this domain because you’re creating something that isn’t purely aesthetic, it’s mechanical and the technologies are changing all the time. The technical team at Schwarz Etienne explained how the sapphires we used for the Tsuba Blue could actually be made thinner and could be angled, and they could have the appliques added to them so that the feet wouldn’t be seen. The technology they used was sufficiently advanced to be able to make incredibly delicate components in a way which wasn’t going to cost tens of thousands of Swiss francs. The watch was much better because of that exchange of ideas. So you have to be able to work as a team, get rid of the ego, and look at making the best thing that you can possibly make. And with the passage of time, you get that done better. The very first collaborations I did, well I would do them very differently today. How important is having a defined narrative within a watch to you as a creative? Everything that I’ve done has had to have a reason for existing. So one example is I made a lot of skull pieces with my old brand, and they weren’t made just to be cool or to appeal to pop culture, they were very much connected with the idea of a Memento Mori. I’ve lost a lot of people in my life, and the most important thing in your life is time. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. So when I designed those watches, the idea was that you look at them and you realize that you’re mortal. When you’re younger, we tend to forget that we’re not immortal. When it came to the dragon pieces I used to do, I’ve always liked Japanese and Chinese culture because their art always has a narrative behind it. Not to be critical, but while a Monet is beautiful and he was incredibly talented, he ultimately studied color and nature, and he represented what he saw on canvas. There wasn’t a narrative. Asian art almost always has a narrative and a reason behind it. Even the classical pieces I made, whether they had guilloche work or complications, those were rites of passage in making respectable, complicated pieces at a high quality. The motivation for making those watches was the narrative, and while they were more commercial, they had a lot more to them than just their aesthetic appeal.