An Audacious Beginning
How does a watchmaker begin his career? Most advance modestly, with a simple three-hand watch, proving their mastery step by step. But in 2013, at just twenty-five, Rexhep Rexhepi, founding his own house AKRIVIA, chose an entirely different path. He knew from the very start that his first watch had to carry one of the most sacred and most demanding complications in all of watchmaking: a tourbillon.
The fruit of this audacity was the AK-01: a masterpiece with a flying tourbillon, crowned by a single-pusher chronograph. The birth of a house was, at the same time, the keeping of a promise a young man had made to himself. The AK-01 is the genesis of AKRIVIA.
The Seed of a Dream
The seed of this passion had been planted much earlier, when Rexhepi was still a young apprentice at Patek Philippe. The day he first stepped into the quality-control workshop, he came face to face with a masterfully made tourbillon wristwatch with a ten-day power reserve. In that instant, something in the young apprentice's mind changed forever.
That tiny cage, defying gravity and averaging out the errors of time as it turned on its own axis, whispered to him that watchmaking was not mere craft but art. From that day on, the question for Rexhepi was no longer whether his first watch should carry a tourbillon, but when.
An Original Form
Rexhepi wanted to house this exceptional mechanism in an exterior worthy of it. The case of the AK-01 is neither a classic round nor a tonneau shape; the master chose to create an original form, aesthetically unique and recognisable at a glance. This 42.5 mm case was produced in steel, titanium and 18-carat gold, with sapphire crystals front and back so that both the dial and the movement are laid bare.
The Symmetrical Face
The dial of the AK-01 is the first manifesto of Rexhepi's design codes: a perfect symmetry. The constant seconds sit at two o'clock, the 30-minute chronograph counter at ten o'clock, and the 100-hour power reserve indicator just below it. Through a small aperture at twelve o'clock, the column wheel that governs the chronograph can be watched, alive.
The most elegant detail, though, is hidden: the chronograph is operated by a single pusher (monopoussoir) integrated into the crown. Start, stop, reset; all from a single point, in a single rhythm. On the unique piece pictured here, the salmon-toned dial and steel-blue hands lay bare the warmth of the mechanism.
The Architecture of the Heart
The movement of the AK-01 was designed to display both the tourbillon and the chronograph on the dial side; even so, in keeping with Rexhepi's principles, perfect symmetry is preserved. A single barrel offers a power reserve of 100 hours, or 72 hours with the chronograph running.
Of this calibre's 181 components, fully 76 are devoted to the tourbillon cage alone; the movement turns on 19 olive-domed and flat jewels. And every surface is finished by hand: Côtes de Genève, mirror-like black polishing, and those inward anglage angles that machines can never cut. Turn the watch over and you read, on the caseback, Pièce Unique, AKRIVIA, Manufacture à Genève.
The Memory of a Craft
All this refinement is the product of a century-old memory, kept in the wooden drawers of a modest atelier in the old town of Geneva. In every drawer a tool, in every tool the trace of a master. The AK-01 was the first page added to that memory.
Everything that today places Rexhep Rexhepi's name among the most respected independent masters in the world was hidden in this first bold step of 2013. The first breath of a dream, the AK-01 is the birth not merely of a house but of a conviction: true greatness lies in attempting the hardest thing from the very beginning.
