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A little over a week before Watches and Wonders opened, Rexhep Rexhepi, the celebrated independent watchmaker from Geneva, introduced an entirely new watch: a flyback chronograph called the “RRCHF,” his first new model in nearly three years. By the time I arrived at one of the five workshops he owns on Grand-Rue in Old Town Geneva—on a sunny Thursday morning during Watches and Wonders week—to see the piece and catch up with him in person, Rexhepi had already received more than 1,700 requests. (To put that in context, his atelier makes no more than 60 watches per year.)

It was a busy day for Rexhepi’s team, as they welcomed a stream of collectors and press into the cozy space, thoughtfully designed by Rexhepi and his wife, Annabelle (their book collection alone is museum-worthy). To avoid having too many people crowding the new watch at once, I was asked to wait in the greeting area on the ground floor, where a woman stood behind a table with a dazzling selection of teas (I opted for a delicious oolong). Downstairs, in the cellar, they had cleared a space to show the new timepiece with as little distraction as possible. A rectangular metal table held two silver trays with rounded, organic shapes. And that was it. While the room was so clinical it could have doubled as an operating theater, the watch, which measures 38.8 mm in diameter and 9.7 mm thick, is anything but.

Available in two versions—a platinum edition with a “stormy blue” grand feu enamel dial and a rose-gold edition with a classic black grand feu enamel dial—the piece, which retails for 150,000 Swiss francs (about $193,000), exudes the warmth of its maker. Rexhepi is often called a “wunderkind,” and his pieces regularly fetch more than a million dollars on the secondary market, but in person he is far from the haughty genius one might imagine. Rather, he is kind, candid, and strikingly humble.

When Rexhepi started making watches under his Akrivia label in 2012, his first timepiece, the AK-01, was a tourbillon monopusher chronograph based on an ebauche movement. Fourteen years later, the CHF is entirely his own. From the stepped bezel and elongated lugs of its case to its gently patinated nubuck calfskin strap, everything—including the movement and the enamel dial, which emerged from the enamel workshop he opened in May 2024—has been crafted in-house. To drive home that point, he created a new dial signature for the piece: “Hgers À Geneve” (an abbreviation for “Watchmakers In Geneva”), which Rexhepi borrowed from an old Leroy pocket watch (“I thought it was very romantic”).

As I admired the watch, Rexhepi explained some of his thinking. “For me, the challenge was to do something in the right proportion,” he told me. “The display for me was really, really important because I think this is how you get your identity.”

As a watchmaker famously obsessed with symmetry, Rexhepi took extra care in perfecting the dial layout. At 12 o’clock you’ll find the hour-and-minutes register. The centrality of the extra-long flyback chronograph seconds hand (in a straw-yellow color) nods to his belief that the watch is, at heart, an instrument. Running seconds appear in the subdial at 7 o’clock, while the subdial at 4 o’clock features a 30-minute counter.

The model’s symmetry is especially evident on the sapphire-crystal caseback, which provides a clear view of the integrated chronograph movement. “It’s not about saying it’s a show-off watch,” Rexhepi said. “You can see that it’s a complex watch. You see, the chronograph is very, very central under this big bridge.”

With 320 components, the CHF is among the most complex pieces Rexhepi has made. When I asked whether the number of components mattered to him, he said his thinking had evolved. “A few years ago, we wanted to do as few components as possible because the way that we fabricate was a bit different,” he said. “Today, we use as many components as we can to do the best watch possible. So here we are more than 300 components. This is quite crazy for a chronograph. For the first one that we did, the chronograph tourbillon, we were at 200.”

Rexhepi spoke about the pressure he puts on himself to make the best watch possible—and about not knowing how it might be received. I was struck by the long view he has taken on his career and what it means in the broader context of 21st-century horology.

“Every time that I’m doing a watch, I’m building something and I’m not sure that people will like it,” he said. “And I think you have to have this fear. Because it’s not about selling something—it’s about, ‘What do you want people to remember?’ And for me, this is just one step. And these steps—we have not one, not two, not three. We have to have like 30, 40 steps in our journey. If you look at Journe, he’s built something incredible. And it took him 25 years.”

Earlier in the appointment, a casually dressed collector from Saudi Arabia had arrived, taken a seat at the table, and quietly worked his loupe over the pieces while I continued to pepper Rexhepi with questions. Not wanting to monopolize the man of the hour (year? decade?), I asked one final question: What did the CHF signal about his future? Was it a sign of more complications to come?

“As a watchmaker, you want to push yourself to do it,” Rexhepi said. “I wanted to prove to myself that I’m able to do a good complication. And the next step, to tell you the truth, is more about invention.” But the Saudi collector was prepared with a quip. “The next step,” he interjected, “is about delivery.” Touché.