Czapek & Cie unveils the Promenade Goutte de Rosée, a 25-piece edition that recasts the rippling poetry of the Goutte d’Eau in 18K 3N yellow gold with a green Grand Feu flinqué enamel dial. The mood is spring at dawn – quiet, luminous, and deliberately restrained.
Launched in 2024 in steel with sapphire-blue enamel, the Promenade’s optical ripple radiating from the small seconds at 4:30 remains. Here it meets warm gold and verdant enamel in a 38 mm case that keeps the line’s refined proportions while adding a gentler, more precious glow.
The dial is the story. Donzé Cadrans begins with a 925 silver plate struck by a bespoke die that carries the full 3D wave motif. Over this relief, artisans apply roughly five layers of translucent green enamel, each fired at high temperature. Depth comes not from gradients, but from controlled enamel thickness: up to 0.5 mm in the troughs, under 0.2 mm on the crests. That 0.3 mm swing is enough to make light behave like water on a still morning. In total, each dial sees about eight kiln passages, then forty minutes of hand polishing – close to five hours of skilled labor for a single face.
Green is notoriously capricious on silver. Donzé Cadrans tested around ten formulations to find one that behaved and looked right. The pronounced relief raises the stakes: coverage must be perfectly even across peaks and ravines or contraction will reveal dark streaks. Only four craftspeople at the atelier enamel these dials with the required regularity, each seasoned by years on Grand Feu white and standard transparent work before graduating to this task. Patience, then enamel, then more patience.
The price of ambition is attrition. Where conventional Grand Feu might see 25 to 30 percent rejected, the Goutte de Rosée approaches 50 percent. Differential stresses between thick and thin zones can provoke cracks when cutting the outer diameter and drilling the center – operations left to the end. To deliver 25, about 60 blanks were started. Target dial thickness is 0.90 mm with a tolerance of ±0.05 mm, which means some dials read a touch denser, others let the waves speak a little louder. Each one is earned – and singular.
“What I find genuinely compelling about this collaboration is that Czapek pushes us into territory we would not have explored on our own” says Claude-Eric Jan, Manager of Donzé Cadrans. “Many houses we work with do not challenge us to go this far in our craft… it is always this one that stops them.”
Through the sapphire back, the in-house automatic Calibre SXH5.1 shows a recycled 950 platinum micro-rotor and seven skeletonised bridges inspired by François Czapek’s pocket watches. It runs at 4 Hz for 60 hours and offers stop seconds – architecture first, theatrics second.
“Promenade is our canvas for creative expression”, says Xavier de Roquemaurel, CEO of Czapek & Cie. “The warmth of yellow gold and the vitality of green enamel bring this vision to life… the rejection rates, the hours of hand-work, the particular chemistry of green on silver – these are precisely what gives each of these 25 dials its character.”
Orders open May 26th 2026 through Czapek authorised retailers, the Geneva flagship, and czapek.com, with deliveries expected from June 2026.
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