Last week, Peter Speake returned to the independent watchmaking scene when he unveiled the first pieces from his new brand, PS Horology. Peter is something of a legendary figure in the indie watchmaking world. He is the co-founder of Speake-Marin, which launched in 2002 after Peter spent a period of time working as a watchmaker for Renaud & Papi in Le Locle, Switzerland. Speake-Marin is perhaps best known for the Piccadilly case design, named for the London district where Peter spent the early part of his career restoring vintage watches. The Piccadilly case, I’ve always felt, is something of an acquired taste. I’ve come to really love it, and see it as a symbol of an earlier era of independent watchmaking when these artisanal, handcrafted watches made in very small batches were not at the front of anyone’s mind. Times, of course, have changed for the better, and indies are currently having the quite the moment, but it’s worth remembering that a line can be drawn from any of the buzzy new indie watchmakers to surface in the last few years all the way back to Peter and his early 2000s contemporaries. To put it plainly, it’s great that he’s back.
Peter founded PS Horology back in 2022 and has been working on the first collection ever since. The Tsuba watches seen here are expected to be the first of several projects for PS Horology in 2025. While it might not look like it on an initial glance, there’s actually connective tissue between the Piccadilly cases of the early Speake-Marin days and the new Tsuba case. They are quite different from a design standpoint, but both draw on very specific historical design codes. For the Piccadilly it was throwback references to classical British watch and clockmaking, while the Tsuba draws inspiration from intricately shaped guards found at the end of a grip on a Japanese sword. Tsubas have a long history in Japanese culture, and eventually evolved into highly ornamental heirlooms made by master craftspeople, which is another clear connection to the watchmaking world that is surely not lost on anyone at PS Horology.
The Tsuba is an integrated bracelet design, with a four sided case featuring scalloped corners and gently rounded surfaces throughout. According to PS Horology, case finishing is a complex five stage process that includes the brushing of all external surfaces and polishing the concave surfaces using a variety of techniques to ensure they are untouched during the graining process. Made from steel, the Tsuba case measures 38.3mm across (from 3:00 to 9:00, crown excluded) and is 8.91mm thick.
There are two variants of the Tsuba available at the launch of the brand. The Tsuba Blue combines inspiration from vintage watches, particularly sector dialed watches, with the use of modern materials and manufacturing techniques. The center of the dial is made from a sapphire disc, and the frame from anodized metal. The blue hour and minute markers have been printed directly onto the sapphire surface and are meant to mimic the look of heat blued dial furniture. According to PS Horology, the printing technique results in a great deal of visual depth from shadows produced by the reflection of the printed elements on the lacquer finish on the underside of the sapphire.
PS Horology is also producing a version of this watch they call the Tsuba Dong Son, with a dial inspired by both Vietnamese and Japanese craft techniques. THe name comes from the Dong Son culture, discovered by archaeologists in 1924 in northern Vietnam. The Dong Son flourished in this region between 1000 BC and the first century AD, and based on archaeological records it has been determined that they were highly skilled in the casting of bronze. The dial of the Tsuba Dong Son is based on symbols found on bronze Dong Son drums that were used for a variety of ceremonial purposes by the Dong Son people.
The Dong Son dial is incredibly intricate, with impossibly small elements of the motif cut into its surface. The smallest of these elements, a bird, is just 1.54mm tall. The dial symbols are also all sanded by hand, which according to the brand is the only way to achieve the proper contrast between the symbols and the dial’s lower surface. It obviously takes a great deal of precision in manufacturing to produce something like this at any scale at all (PS Horology is making 80 examples of the Dong Son).
The movement powering both of these watches is the 5401 caliber produced by Vaucher Manufacture. This is a thin (2.6mm) micro-rotor movement with 48 hours of power reserve and a free-sprung balance.
It’s genuinely very exciting to see Peter Speake take on an active role in a brand (kind of) bearing his name once again. He never really went away, of course – he co-founded and developed The Naked Watchmaker before leaving that project in 2022 to start PS Horology, and he occasionally used TNW to collaborate on limited editions (with Frederique Constant and Schwartz Etienne, for example). But starting a new brand is a very different thing than designing the occasional LE, and it will be fascinating to see how PS Horology develops in what is a completely different era for indies than the one Speake-Marin began in.
Both versions of the Tsuba are limited editions (80, as mentioned, for the Dong Son, with the Tsuba Blue being made in 100 examples). The retail price for the Tsuba Blue is CHF 19,500 (pricing for the Dong Son edition has not yet been announced). PS Horology