Urban Jürgensen, a renowned member of a celebrated watchmaking family in Copenhagen, died in 1830. Yet today the visionary horologist’s legacy seems to have taken on new relevance.
At a press event in Los Angeles early this month, the Urban Jürgensen brand was officially reintroduced — along with three new watches — under new leadership, now that two co-chief executives, the award-winning independent watchmaker Kari Voutilainen and Alex Rosenfield, an American fashion, media and marketing executive, are leading the 252-year-old brand.
Although the company has steadily produced watches since its 1773 founding as Larpent & Jürgensen, it has had numerous owners since 1830.
In 2021, Mr. Rosenfield’s father, Andrew Rosenfield, an entrepreneur and a longtime client of Mr. Voutilainen’s, led the purchase of the company from a consortium of Danish private equity investors. He now is the executive chairman of the revived company.
“At the center of what we’re doing,” Alex Rosenfield said during an interview last month at his parents’ home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, “is careful, considered, thoughtful watchmaking that stands the test of time.”
Positioned at the highest end of the market, with prices from 100,000 to 400,000 Swiss francs ($121,792 to $487,168), the three new watches — a time-only model, a perpetual calendar and a 250th anniversary timepiece that actually has come out during the brand’s 252nd year — are likely to appeal to watch connoisseurs but are not aimed solely at them, he said.
“I always loved wearing a beautiful watch, but I didn’t know that much,” he said. “My view of how we talk about Urban Jürgensen is in part informed by that. I loved watches, but I wasn’t an escapement junkie.”
The younger Mr. Rosenfield’s lack of fanboy enthusiasm for the intricate time-keeping mechanism known as an escapement is hardly a problem. For all things mechanical, there is Mr. Voutilainen.
An acclaimed maker who lives and works in Môtiers, Switzerland, Mr. Voutilainen can relate to the story of Urban Jürgensen (the man) in more ways than one. Born in Finland, Mr. Voutilainen left there 35 years ago to pursue watchmaking in Switzerland — not unlike Mr. Jürgensen, who traveled around Europe to study under a trio of history’s best horologists: John Arnold, Abraham-Louis Breguet and Ferdinand Berthoud.
Mr. Voutilainen said he admired Mr. Jürgensen for pioneering the manufacture of marine chronometers, the precision time-keeping instruments designed for navigators, at a time when watchmaking was still in its infancy. “That science didn’t really exist,” Mr. Voutilainen said last month on a video call from Helsinki, Finland, where he was exhibiting at a watchmaking event. “They were discovering things like temperature compensation and how you get your oil. You can’t go to a supplier and buy oil. So you have to make it by yourself.”
Mr. Jürgensen also wrote the 1804 publication “General Principles Concerning Timekeeping by Clocks and Watches,” an influential book on watchmaking theory, and in 1815, he was inducted into the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
Mr. Voutilainen’s initial experience with Urban Jürgensen (the brand) began in 1996, at the invitation of Peter Baumberger, the Swiss businessman who owned the brand at the time. With the involvement of the English watchmaker Derek Pratt, often hailed by watch connoisseurs as an unsung hero of independent watchmaking, the brand began producing pocket and wristwatches that have earned comparisons to some of the modern era’s finest timepieces.
“When Peter bought the company, he wanted to make it great again,” Mr. Voutilainen said. “And with these pocket watches, he did that. They were really incredible. When you look at that time, the quartz crisis was the deepest. A lot of companies were closing down. But he launched with these incredible pocket watches.”
At a Phillips sale in Geneva in November, a 2005 pocket watch that Mr. Pratt had made for Urban Jürgensen sold for $4.22 million, nearly four times its high estimate. Mr. Pratt worked on the piece, known as The Oval, for about 20 years, but when he became ill, Mr. Voutilainen completed its assembly and finishing. (He has described the effort as one of the highlights of his career.)
Mr. Voutilainen had become an independent watchmaker in 2002, but he continued to work for the brand — doing mechanical work, assembly and prototyping, and providing after-sales service — until Mr. Baumberger’s death in 2010.
“I did quite a lot of different things, which is one of the reasons why I accepted to be part of it,” he said of his work with the brand between 1996 and 2010. “There was also this Scandinavian heritage — that when we look at the dials, they are very elegant and clean. All that was really appealing for me.”
Silas Walton, the founder and chief executive of A Collected Man, a rare and vintage timepieces dealership in London, said he was “hugely relieved” that Mr. Voutilainen and the Rosenfields were leading the brand into a new era. “The fundamentals are amazing,” he said. “The DNA is amazing. The language is all there for something truly fantastic. But you have to be patient and dedicated and you have to be prepared to invest to do it well.”
By all accounts the Rosenfields are prepared to do just that. The brand’s new campaign features Ellen von Unwerth’s photographs of people in various fields — an actor, a visual artist, a ceramist, a poet — doing what they love, to celebrate the concept of “time kept and spent beautifully,” Alex Rosenfield said.
“So often the way we talk about watches is to center the watch all the time,” he noted. “But your day is about how you spend your time, the people you interact with, the things you love doing. We wanted to look for a way of talking about what we were doing that was a little more emotional.”
The watches are assembled and finished in-house at Urban Jürgensen’s headquarters in Bienne, Switzerland — separate from Mr. Voutilainen’s own production operations, but under his supervision — and are to be sold by the brand, via phone or email. The Rosenfields said that they hoped to open showrooms within a year or so and that they were also considering a road show.
“The quantities will be very limited at the beginning because we’re producing everything by hand, in the same way that people have come to expect from Kari,” Alex Rosenfield said. “Our goal is for it to get much larger over a few years. But even at its largest, it will be small.”
Among lovers of Danish watchmaking, many of whom consider the brand sacrosanct, the approach feels just right.
“To me, the brand is like Lego and Bang & Olufsen — it’s as big as Tivoli,” said Kristian Haagen, a Danish watch collector and freelance journalist, referring to the popular amusement park and pleasure gardens in Copenhagen. “I’m 55 years old and have been collecting for 35-odd years — Urban Jürgensen has always been there. It’s a great independent brand with amazing watches, dials to die for, teardrop lugs and a very limited production.
“Having Kari introducing the watches, which look like nothing Urban Jürgensen has done before, proves this is definitely a new generation.”
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