News · Cleguer Horology

Cleguer Horology debuts with an escapement built to solve the natural escapement's oldest fault

The Inspiration One puts a proprietary Innate escapement and a 12.9 mm balance under a tiered, openworked front, in a 38.5 mm titanium case limited to 80 watches in total.

Hen & Mills Editorial · 4 min read · 17 August 2026

• Cleguer Horology, founded in Geneva by watchmaking engineer Mathieu Cleguer, has launched its first watch, the hand-wound Inspiration One.
• Its proprietary Innate escapement combines the double escape wheel of a natural escapement with Fasoldt style tangential action to be both low friction and self-starting.
• Production is capped at 80 watches across five case metals in batches of 12, with 20 movements finished as unique pieces; no price has been published.

An escapement that fixes the one thing everybody complains about

Watch people have been arguing about the natural escapement for two hundred years, which is a long time to spend on a mechanism almost nobody owns. Breguet drew it, a handful of moderns have revived it, and the objection is always the same: it is beautifully efficient and it will not reliably start itself. If the watch stops, it may simply sit there. Mathieu Cleguer, a watchmaking engineer working in Geneva, has spent his first watch attacking exactly that problem, and the result is the Cleguer Horology Inspiration One.

His solution is called the Innate escapement, and the brand describes it plainly enough to follow. It keeps the double escape wheel of the natural escapement, which is where the low friction comes from, and borrows the indirect tangential action of a Fasoldt escapement. Those combine into a single central lever carrying both the locking and the impulse pallets. The claim is an escapement that is both friction free and self-starting, which is the pairing that has kept the natural escapement a curiosity rather than a standard.

Sitting next to it is a balance wheel of 12.9 mm, which is enormous by wristwatch standards and the reason the front of this watch looks the way it does. A big balance carries more inertia, here quoted at 50 mg.cm, and more inertia means the oscillator is less easily disturbed by whatever your arm is doing. It runs slowly, at 18,000 vibrations per hour, so the seconds hand steps five times a second and the whole thing has the unhurried look of a pocket watch movement, which is roughly what it is.

Layer by layer, and the dial that is barely a dial

Look at the front and there is almost no dial in the conventional sense. The architecture descends in tiers, from the central seconds down past the barrel bridge to the mainplate, and the openings are placed to reveal specific things rather than to be open for the sake of it: the escapement, the balance, and the power reserve, which Cleguer has put on the front where you can actually read it. The mainplate and bridges are nickel silver, plated in champagne and rhodium, so the tiers separate by colour as well as by depth.

The hours and minutes live in a small champlevé grand feu enamel subdial pushed off to the right. Enamel is there for contrast, since a white disc floating over a metallic movement is the most legible thing you could put in that space, and the off-centre position means the time sits clear of a shirt cuff when your arm is down. It is a genuinely practical piece of placement dressed up as an aesthetic decision.

Turn it over and the reverse is where the traditional watchmaking is: the gear train, the ratchet click system and a Maltese cross stopwork, which limits winding to the most even part of the mainspring's torque curve. Stopwork is an eighteenth century answer to a problem modern mainsprings mostly solve on their own, and putting one in a 2026 watch is a statement about what kind of watch this intends to be. The caseback is engraved with the collection name and the number of the piece.

Titanium, 38.5 millimetres, and 36 hours

The case is titanium in the subscription series, 38.5 mm across and 12 mm thick, which for a watch built around a 12.9 mm balance and a tiered movement is genuinely restrained. Titanium also keeps the weight down, and on a watch you are meant to keep tilting towards the light to see what is happening inside, weight matters more than usual. The profile shows a domed crystal standing proud of a thin bezel, and a knurled crown that would look at home on a pocket watch.

The power reserve is 36 hours. That is short by modern standards and entirely normal for a hand-wound movement with a single barrel and a large, slow balance, and it makes the watch a daily ritual rather than a set-and-forget proposition. You wind it in the morning, or it stops. For a watch whose whole argument is that you should look at how it works, being asked to participate every day feels like the correct trade.

Cleguer has been specific about scarcity too. Only 80 Inspiration One watches will be made, across five case metals, in batches of 12, with 20 movements set aside to become unique pieces. Sixty plus twenty is the whole run, and the arithmetic tells you something about the intent. One watchmaker has decided in advance where the story ends.

Cleguer Inspiration One pricing and availability

Cleguer Horology has not published a price for the Inspiration One on its own site, and there is no Australian pricing or distribution, with enquiries handled directly by the brand in Geneva. Nor does the brand state a water resistance figure, which for a watch of this type is worth knowing before you take it near a tap. The titanium version is described as the subscription series, and the production run is capped at 80 watches, in batches of 12 per case metal, with 20 movements finished as unique pieces.

Independent debuts usually lead with a complication, because a complication photographs well and explains itself in a headline. Leading instead with an escapement, and with a stopwork on the back that most owners will never think about, is a harder sell and a more interesting one. I have no idea yet whether the Innate escapement will prove out over decades, and neither does anyone else. That is what makes it worth watching.