This £10,000 Clock Doesn't Come Assembled. That's the Point
MB&F's new Nostromo desk clock ships as 222 loose components and a 250-page manual, part of a watch-world roundup that also includes a blue-dial Tiffany chronograph and a pocket watch built to count off a millennium.
The MB&F x Maison Alcée Nostromo desk clock, an oval skeletonized clock with exposed gold and steel gearing on spidery metal legs · Photo: MB&F
MB&F's new Nostromo desk clock looks, at a glance, like the brand's usual register: spindly metal legs, an exposed movement, a body that could pass for salvaged space hardware. The twist is what happens after you pay the roughly £10,000 asking price. The clock arrives as 222 unassembled components and a 250-page illustrated manual, and putting it together is the buyer's job.
That format comes from Maison Alcée, the French clockmaker MB&F partnered with on the piece. Founded in 2022 by Alcée and Benoît Montfort, Maison Alcée sells every clock it makes as a kit, guided by lengthy instructions and a private buyer discussion group rather than handed over finished. MB&F started stocking the brand's debut piece, the Persée, after noticing it, and the Nostromo (named for the ship in Alien) is the two houses' first full collaboration. No prior watchmaking experience is required, and MB&F estimates roughly 10 hours to build it. Once assembled, the finished clock displays the time, chimes the hour, runs on a 14-day power reserve, and sits free to rotate on its three curved legs. It's limited to 50 pieces, and given that Maison Alcée's last limited run for Hodinkee reportedly sold out in about four hours, patience alone probably won't secure one.
A few other releases rounded out the same week. Tiffany & Co. followed its earlier Tiffany Timer chronographs with a 100-piece limited edition that uses its signature blue more sparingly — a dark blue dial with Tiffany Blue accents, a titanium case, and a platinum bezel, built on a Zenith El Primero automatic chronograph movement with the brand's Bird on a Rock motif visible on the winding rotor through a sapphire caseback.
Atelier Wen, a watchmaker built around Chinese craft traditions, partnered with collector William Massena on a version of its Inflection watch that reworks the classic “California” dial — the half-Roman, half-Arabic numeral layout Rolex patented in the 1940s for legibility — by splitting it instead between hand-calligraphed Chinese numerals on the bottom half and Arabic numerals on top, cased in tantalum with a hand-engraved gold dial. And Urwerk built exactly one UR-1001 Amadeus, a rectangular titanium pocket watch whose complications include a counter that tracks years in five-year increments up to a century before resetting, at which point it sends a pulse to a separate 1,000-year counter on the case back.
