Why We Chose Grand Feu

The decision to return to grand feu was never about choosing the harder path. It was about deciding what kind of work we wanted ETIEN to leave behind.

A grand feu enamel dial rarely looks the same twice. Move it toward a window and the colour shifts. Turn it slightly and the guilloché beneath begins to reveal itself differently — areas that seemed dark a moment ago suddenly catch the light, exposing detail that was almost invisible before.

This relationship between enamel, engraving, and light is what first drew me to flinqué enamel many years ago. It's something I never quite stopped thinking about.

The Original Intention

When ETIEN was founded in 2021, transparent grand feu enamel over guilloché was already the dial I hoped to make. As I wrote in The Long Road to Grand Feu Enamel, reality proved more difficult. For a young workshop, the cost of learning through repeated failure was simply too high.

Cold enamel offered another way forward. It let ETIEN begin making watches, experiment with guilloché patterns, and keep developing the workshop. I don't look back on those years as something to erase — they were the right approach for ETIEN at that stage.

But the desire to return to grand feu never really disappeared.

A Question in London

Some years later, I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum. Like most museums, it's filled with objects whose makers disappeared long ago, yet whose work is still studied and admired.

During that visit, I found myself looking closely at a snuff box decorated in flinqué enamel. I was struck by the workmanship, but I also started thinking about something beyond the object itself: someone had made this many years before. The world around it had changed, generations had passed, and yet here I was, still standing in front of it, still looking closely at the details.

I began thinking about my own watches. Would an ETIEN watch ever be good enough to sit in a museum like this? And if, many years from now, someone stood in front of one — would there still be something worth stopping to look at?

That thought stayed with me. I don't think the visit changed ETIEN's direction outright; the urge to return to grand feu was already there. But it made me think more seriously about what I wanted ETIEN's work to become.

Returning to Fire

What drew me back to grand feu wasn't simply that it was harder to make — difficulty, on its own, has little value. What mattered was the material, and what happened to it through the process.

Grand feu enamel begins as glass. During firing, it softens and fuses to the metal beneath it — layer after layer, firing after firing — until it becomes part of the dial. With transparent enamel over guilloché, light travels through the glass before reaching the engraved metal below. As the watch moves, different parts of the pattern catch the light and return it through the enamel.

The effect is surprisingly hard to photograph. A dial that reads deep blue from one angle can turn intensely bright from another. The guilloché can seem almost hidden, then suddenly emerge with the smallest movement of the wrist. This quality is what fascinated me from the beginning.

There was something else, too: permanence. The objects I'd been looking at in the V&A had survived because generations before us made things intended to endure. Grand feu enamel belongs to that same long tradition of working with glass, metal, and fire — and that idea resonated with the kind of work I wanted ETIEN to pursue.

Accepting What Comes With It

Returning to grand feu didn't make the difficulties disappear. Dials cracked. Bubbles appeared. Surfaces behaved differently than expected. Sometimes a dial that had already consumed many hours of work had to be rejected. Even today, there's an element of uncertainty every time a dial enters the kiln.

But by the time ETIEN returned to grand feu, the workshop was better prepared to accept that uncertainty. Failures gradually became part of the learning process — each one revealing something about how the silver moved during firing, how the enamel behaved at different stages, or how a small change in preparation could affect the finished surface.

Progress came slowly. It still does. Perhaps that's part of what keeps the craft interesting.

Why We Chose Grand Feu

So why did we choose grand feu?

Not because it's the most complicated way to make a dial. And not because other ways of making enamel dials have no place.

We chose it because it brought ETIEN back to the material that inspired the brand in the first place: transparent enamel over an engraved surface, transformed through fire and constantly changing with light. More than that, it represented the kind of work I wanted ETIEN to pursue.

I don't know whether an ETIEN watch will ever sit behind museum glass — that isn't something a maker gets to decide. What I can decide is how we make the watches today.

Returning to grand feu was part of that decision.