Just ahead of Geneva Watch Days, MB&F has turned its attention to the desk. Working with Maison Alcée, the young French house that sells mechanical table clocks as build-it-yourself kits, it has produced the Nostromo: a clock you assemble yourself over the course of an evening or two. It marks the fifteenth anniversary of MB&F's M.A.D. Gallery, and, as Monochrome reports, it is named after the ship from the first Alien film. Forbes covered it on 28 August.
The gallery and the kit-maker
Max Büsser opened the M.A.D. Gallery in Geneva in 2011 as a home for kinetic art and moving objects, MB&F's own machines alongside work by other makers. Maison Alcée is a natural fit for that brief. Founded in 2021 by Alcée and Benoît Montfort, the husband-and-wife team builds clocks that arrive as component kits rather than finished objects, starting with the Persée, a table clock supplied as 233 separate parts for the owner to put together. The Montforts are careful to say this is not a toy. In their words the kit is presented in a highly pedagogical way, "but it isn't child's play."
What you build
The Nostromo carries that idea over to an MB&F design. It was drawn by Maximilian Maertens, MB&F's creative designer, and built by Maison Alcée. The kit runs to 222 components, and the movement is meant to take around ten hours to put together. The only part that arrives pre-assembled is the regulating organ, the one section where a mistake would be hard to undo. A 250-page manual guides the rest, with video walkthroughs reachable by QR code. Where the Persée stands upright, the Nostromo lies flat: a central ring flanked by two rounded housings, the whole thing resting on three thin curved legs that give it the look the name promises. It is made from brass, stainless steel and German silver, weighs 760 grams and measures 160mm long, 135mm wide and 123mm tall.
The clock itself
For all the sculptural framing, it keeps time in a conventional way, with hours and minutes on the central ring and a running seconds at three o'clock. There is also an on-demand hour chime, struck when you press for it rather than on every hour, which keeps a desk clock from announcing itself all day. The power reserve is a genuine fourteen days, so a single winding carries it through a fortnight. The ring that serves as the dial is finished in the peacock blue the M.A.D. Gallery uses as its signature colour, and that is the clearest visual link back to the gallery the clock is celebrating.
Price and availability
Nostromo is limited to fifty pieces and sold only through the M.A.D. Galleries in Geneva and Dubai and the MB&F LAB stores, at CHF 12,000 before tax. That is a lot for a clock, and a good part of what you are paying for is the building of it. For a certain kind of collector, the one who has always wanted to watch a movement come together without risking a wristwatch to find out, that may be the whole appeal.
