Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It can leave you speechless. It might stop you in your tracks and make you do a double take. The Christopher Ward C1 Bel Canto Lucia does all of the above.

This is a beautiful watch; no doubt about that, not beautiful as in a writer’s throwaway line, but beautiful as in stunning, the kind you need to see firsthand to confirm you were not dreaming.

The kind of watch you need to see on your wrist, the kind that makes you imagine how the light plays with the dial at different times of the day.

The kind of watch that finds you daydreaming, staring at its face and saying to yourself, “Man, that’s one fine watch”. The kind of watch you can lose your heart to, too.

Named after the lead character of Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor, the Bel Canto Lucia takes inspiration from one of its most famous scenes, in which Lucia sings about a bird that only she can see.

The Bel Canto Lucia’s predecessor

The Bel Canto Lucia’s predecessor, the Christopher Ward C1 Bel Canto, showcased a chiming skeletonised complication. In a fortuitous twist of fate, admirers of that watch could not help but notice how the exposed hourly striking mechanism of the FS01 chiming module resembled a bird on the dial. And so a myth was born.

“People started pointing out very early on that FS01’s chiming works looked a bit like a bird. The slightly embarrassing truth is that this wasn’t necessarily intentional – the desired symmetry of the mechanism led us there,” says Christopher Ward Product Director Jörg Bader.

Bader goes on to explain, “With Lucia, Mr Jones Watches has taken that happy accident and turned it into something very real. The challenge for us was ensuring that the artwork could become part of the mechanism itself, with the beak and tail retaining genuine mechanical functions.”

The C1 Bel Canto Lucia follows in the footsteps of 2025’s C1 Celestial Moonphase, the first watch collaboration between Christopher Ward and Mr Jones Watches. Its 300-piece run sold out in less than 48 hours and was subsequently nominated at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG).

In light of its well-deserved success, talk turned to how the two companies could collaborate again, this time with a more technically ambitious brief: to integrate Mr Jones Watches’ artwork directly with the mechanical architecture of the watch.

On the Lucia, that resemblance to a bird is no longer left to one’s imagination. The mythical beast has become an integral working part of the watch, a songbird at its centre. The position of its beak tells you whether the chime is engaged: when the pusher at four o’clock is pressed, a delightful rotating bug mounted on the column wheel prompts the bird to open or close its beak.

Its tail has a rather more exciting job: for it is the hammer that delivers the hourly D note. It really is serendipity in motion.

“The Bel Canto watch was a dream to design for,” says illustrator and watch designer Andy Wilx. “I wanted to create a world you could peer into, and with so much space between the mechanism and crystal, I was able to create a design with real depth.”

The bird isn’t simply painted onto the dial. It is assembled from six separate stamped brass pieces that travel to Mr Jones Watches, where each one undergoes a painstaking production process.

Here, the bird’s framing elements are gold-plated. The scene’s striking colours are applied using a traditional dial pad-printing process. Each and every colour requires its own printing plate and needs repeated applications to give Andy Wilx’s stunning design the grand treatment it deserves.

Layers and layers of ink are printed on an artwork measured in millimetres, as each of the 19 individual colours is laid down with the precision and dexterity that would make a heart surgeon proud.

Once finished, the individual components are precisely aligned and laminated together using custom jigs developed specifically for the project.

The completed assemblies are then returned to Christopher Ward’s Atelier in Biel for final assembly onto the movement. This makes Mr Jones Watches an integral part of the manufacturing process of each C1 Bel Canto Lucia, rather than merely the source of its artwork. The result is striking.

If the watch sounds anywhere near as good as it looks, it’s truly a masterpiece, but nothing less than you would expect from Christopher Ward, one of the most magnificent disruptive innovators in modern watchmaking, who has now turned disruption into an art form.

The C1 Bel Canto Lucia joins the Christopher Ward Atelier Collection as an open-series model and is available from £3,995. To listen to the FS01 module yourself and view its superb artwork in person, book an appointment at the Christopher Ward showroom, or secure yours directly at christopherward.com.

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