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AMERICAN BRANDS
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AMERICAN BRANDS
Bright Fire from he Nostalgia Collection. Red abalone shell inlaid in maple wood. Simple and elegant. Time required: 2-3 hours.
CELESTE
Golden Ochre horse is 21 pieces of abalone shell tinted golden ochre, inlaid in mother-of- pearl. A clear stone serves as the dial marker at 12 and also as the horse’ s eye. Time required to make the dial is 8-12 hours.
Celeste Wong will never look at hardwood floors the same again. And how that relates to the stunning watches she creates may be a head scratcher at first, but it becomes all too clear when she tells you the hurdles she overcame to make her visions a reality.
“ It took more than two years to take the Nostalgia model from idea to reality,” Celeste shared with About Time. The Nostalgia is the first watch she created for her Springfield, Oregon-based line of aptly named Celeste watches.“ I had this beautiful watch built with abalone and wood and then the first time it rained it stopped working.”
You might think it is because she didn ' t understand the importance of integrating proper water resistance into a watch, but that is not the case. And that brings us back to the hardwood floors. As anyone who has ever installed them knows, you have to leave a gap between the wall and the first line of planks. This is because all wood expands and contracts as humidity and temperature change.
“ So, that is exactly what happened to my first watch with a partially wooden dial,” Celeste said.“ Then I went back to the drawing board and found fifty ways not to stabilize wood until I finally found a process that worked.” A process, by the way, she has no intention of sharing with anyone else.
Celeste Wong is an engineer by trade, a long-time lover of horology by way of tuna( more on that later) and an artist by passion. About three years ago she set out on a journey to bring all those things together in a new watch brand that brings new meaning to the word“ handmade.”
“ The brand started out as something for women, because it is so hard to find a really beautiful woman ' s watch,” Celeste told us.“ At least what my idea of beautiful is. I ' m not a fan of bling.” But now, Celeste says she doesn ' t put any gender on her watches and some of them have far more male buyers than female.
Her watches incorporate imagery that run from geometric shapes to detailed inlaid constructions of animals from sea turtles to horses to fish – the latter being the centerpiece of her Hook ' Em collection. The Joy Ride collection even features a 1960s era VW van.
Incorporating wood, abalone shell and mother of pearl, each watch is a mini-masterpiece and clearly a labor of love for Celeste. They come in 35mm and 38mm cases, though she is considering larger models, and all use Swiss Ronda quartz engines. For Celeste, it is more about the art than it is about the mechanics of timekeeping. Though she does have plans to offer an Eterna automatic line in the future as well.
Celeste hand-assembles every unit herself with the real work being poured into the creation of the dial. The journey begins in her imagination with the imagery she desires for the dial and from there to the computer and then on to a laser-cutting machine to create the delicate pieces that will become the dial ' s art work. The base is a standard, plain brass dial, which she colors with a ceramic electro-
66 | AboutTime Magazine