RESERVOIR
Reservoir was founded in Paris in 2015 by François Moreau, who came to watchmaking after a long career in banking, around a single idea borrowed from instrumentation: read the time the way you read a gauge. Its watches show the minutes on a 240-degree retrograde sweep, the hours through a jumping aperture, and the remaining power on a dial laid out like a fuel gauge. The result is a French brand with an immediately identifiable face.
Instruments, Not Dials
Each collection takes its cues from a specific instrument tradition — aviation cockpits, classic car dashboards, diving gauges, marine pressure dials — with typography, needles and scales drawn from the source rather than merely suggested by it. The complication is engineered to serve that reading: the minutes run out, then snap back, exactly as an instrument needle would.
French Design, Swiss Construction
Reservoir designs in Paris and produces in La Chaux-de-Fonds, combining a Swiss automatic base with the retrograde and jumping-hour module that defines the brand. Production is small and the collections are tightly themed. Within a decade the house has established a visual signature distinct enough to be recognised across a room, and has been nominated repeatedly at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.