The Oddball World of Stepan Sarpaneva

The Oddball World of

STEPAN SARPANEvA

The watchmaker in the making: Stepan Sarpaneva, aged 6, practices his signature pose on a traditional family holiday in the Finnish lake district.

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As far as my friends are concerned, I am doing really useless stuff. And who can blame them? Why would I do this stupid thing?Stepan Sarpaneva

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Watchmaking is a very precise art. I like the technicality of it. You have to follow the rules when you make a watch or it won’t work. Mechanical watches are the last thing from history that we are still using – hardly anything has changed. Watches still use hours, minutes and seconds, and their movements still tick the time with the same mechanism. Which leaves me with plenty of room to play with everything else…

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Pentti’s prototype for his ‘Turun Hopea’ cutlery, made in the late 1960s.

“Pitsi was a unique watch, which I built very early in my career. In tribute to my roots, it is mounted on a ‘Revinnäis’ bracelet – one of my father’s most famous designs.”

A mask by Pentti Sarpaneva, made of his favourite material, bronze. Often warmed up with local, natural stones – amethyst, rose and smoke quartz – Pentti’s work evokes fiery metal, melting icicles, flowing volcanic lava or raised tree bark; all raw and elemental, like Finland itself.

I was surrounded by art and design as a youth, but I wasn’t ‘educated’ as such… it was just around.

Pentti’s ‘Revinnäis’ bracelet for his ‘Turun Hopea’ collection.

Stepan Sarpaneva was born in 1970 to a Finnish family with a long heritage of craftmanship. Son of jewellery designer Pentti Sarpaneva, and nephew to Finland’s renowned product designer Timo, it was perhaps inevitable that Stepan would grow into some sort of artist, or artisan.

Just as Pentti loved to work in bronze, Stepan is passionate about his preferred choice of material: “Everything that is made from steel is fascinating. I have been repairing and building bikes and cars from very young and steel has always been very important for me. My great-grandfather was a blacksmith; maybe it comes from there?”

Father of the watchmaker: jewellery designer Pentti Sarpaneva (1925–1978)

THE FAMILY SARPANEvA

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Stepan’s mother and Pentti’s muse, Pirkko-Liisa, modelling her husband’s ‘Turun Hopea’ bronze jewellery.

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The simple life: on holiday with the Sarpaneva’s in 1972, on Nilakka Lake, Pielavesi. Stepan’s mother Pirkko-Liisa holds a 2-year-old Stepan, with his older brother, Ontrei.

COTTAGELIFE

I spent my childhood summers in Finland’s lake district, staying in a simple, traditional Finnish cottage. Nearly all my family were artists or artistic people. It was a very alternative lifestyle, with all the kinds of difficulties and pleasures that can bring. This all had a big influence on me for sure…

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In the 1960s, Stepan’s father Pentti renovated an 18th-century granary house, turning it into his family’s annual summerhouse.

Spring cleaning on Lake Nilakka. Pielavesi is an unspoilt region of breathtaking natural beauty, about 400 km north of Helsinki.

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“One of my first motorbikes was a Harley Shovelhead 1976 FX that I completely rebuilt into a Custom. In the end I had to make a choice, and ended up selling it to fund the start of my small company in Helsinki. So, you could say that without motorcycles and my love for them, Sarpaneva Watches would never have existed.”

Stepan’s latest bike, a 1982 H-D FLT, customised with his signature Black Moon motifs: that enigmatic Moonface below the saddle, and disc brakes echoing his stencilled dial pattern.

Actually my company owes its beginnings to my passion for motorcycles.

MOTORHEAd

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Year 1999Edition of 6 unique pieces

TIME TRAMP

The first piece I made for myself, which I still wear sometimes, is a pocket watch I named Time Tramp. It was made from the kickstart pinion of my first Harley-Davidson motorbike.

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I enjoyed restoring old cars and motorcycles and still do. I was taking them apart before I was even old enough to legally ride one! This love of ‘mechanical toys’ led to my enrolling at the School of Watchmaking in Tapiola, near Helsinki in 1989, then Switzerland’s famous WOSTEP school.

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CAbLE GuY

Stepan’s building originally housed Suomen Kaapelitehdas (the Finnish Cable Factory), which manufactured telegraph, electricity and telephone lines from 1942 to 1985. When production ceased, the owner of the factory Nokia Oy began leasing out the facilities to artists. Sarpaneva Watches is quite unique amongst this unique-enough – and oh-so-hip – community of musicians, dancers, painters and photographers.

The very first ‘Sarpaneva’ watches were made in Stepan’s home, using a metal lathe in his kitchen. But in 2003 he moved his workshop to the old cable factory by the Helsinki seaside, and he’s been there ever since.

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Gesturing across the vast industrial plot, Stepan likes to declare, “One day, all this will be mine!” To reach his workshop, you board a rickety elevator and creep down a squeaky-clean, white corridor. Through an anonymous door, we find the birthplace of every Sarpaneva watch, decorated with clues to Stepan’s pedigree: a framed portrait of Breguet, an Iittala vase (Stepan’s uncle Timo designed the iconic ‘i’ logo in 1956), a scooter… and, er, a stack of Monster Magnet CDs.

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The half-smiling, half-scowling Sarpaneva Moon takes shape over a complex process. The first step requires creating a drawing six-times actual size, followed by cutting a rough model from plate stock, one piece corresponding to each level of elevation of the oversized model. These parts are then fixed together to form the model plate for the pantograph, which will mill the various shapes into a small piece of copper the actual size of the Moonphase. This copper version, which will serve later as an electrode, is then cleaned up and ‘fine-tuned’ by a master engraver before the contours are electro-etched into a steel-pressing block, creating a negative image of the face. Last but not least, the eyes are modelled by hand into the negative image and the whole is finished by a master engraver and diamond-polished before undergoing hardening, followed by yet another polishing. Simple, really!

SIMPLEWORKBig, powerful machines are used to prototype and eventually make small, painstaking details in Stepan’s watches – many at engineering firms in Helsinki itself, rather than the usual route of outsourcing component manufacture to Switzerland.

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With every model of watch he creates, Stepan never wants to make hundreds of pieces per year. Instead, he wants to constantly evolve the shape of his cases, dials and many other details, as well as develop brand-new models and ever-more complicated timepieces. Easier said than done, however; this is a process that requires experimentation, mistakes, accidents, success, then prototyping, all behind closed doors, on Stepan’s secret custom workbench.

“This has nothing to do with a secret wish to make people crazy with so-called ‘limited editions’,” he says. “I just want to stay fresh and explore! So right now, I don’t expect to make more than about a hundred versions of a watch before I start to change things. My father and uncle were known for this too; after something was completed, they didn’t hang around enjoying it, they were already busy with yet another new project or concept. This hunger for new challenges is something I sense in myself as well.”

Eero Aarnio, most famous for creating the era-defining Ball Chair of the Sixties, worked with Stepan on the one-of-a-kind ‘Proto’ in 2001. The case, measuring 55 mm long, was handmade from brass, rhodium plated and curved to the wrist. Pictured here is the prototype.

Stepan’s personal ‘Blackmooned’ iPhone, with his famous Moonface doubling as the button.

STEPAN'S SECRET CuSTOM SHOP

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A prototype case that tested the use of spectrolite as a dial. Spectrolite is an multicoloured, iridescent gemstone discovered in Finland in the Forties and still mined there, as well as Madagascar.

‘Mokume’ (2002), a unique piece whose dial was handmade by Kaisa Vuorinen, a contemporary jeweller designer based in Helsinki, like Stepan.

A custom model of Korona, called ‘JGB’, fitted with the client’s own movement.

This has nothing to do with a secret wish to make people crazy with so-called ‘limited editions’... I just want to stay fresh and explore!”

A one-off special edition of Supernova featured a sparkling constellation of diamonds, mounted on top of its eight case screws.

Black Moon cufflinks

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ON THE ROAd

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An impressive display of Korona watches on Sarpaneva Watches’ stand at Baselworld, Basel, Switzerland – the world’s largest and most important annual trade show for the watch and jewellery industries.

My work takes me all over the world, from Basel to Kuala Lumpur to Paris… It’s a wonder I manage to make any watches!

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Year 2000Edition of 25 pieces

Salpa is the Finnish word for ‘bolt’ as in ‘lock and bolt’. Appropriate, given the watch’s monumental, rock-solid presence on the wrist.

SALPA

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Bold simplicity is Scandinavia itself, and inherent within all of Stepan’s watch designs. The clean lines of Salpa were complemented by a telling choice of unembellished material: brushed Stavax ESR steel – three times harder than conventional stainless steel.

Steel is real! I cannot explain how it looks and feels to me, but it is impossible to get the same feelings with wood or glass. I have always liked, even preferred the ‘essence’ of steel-cased watches, as it fits with my desire for simplicity and the beauty you find in basic materials and designs – whether inspired by manmade or natural elements.

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The year 2003 was when things really started happening at Sarpaneva Watches. Stepan had spent almost a decade working in the Swiss watchmaking industry, for prestigious names like Piaget and Parmigiani – “where I learned from my fellow countryman Kari Voutilainen how complicated watches SHOULD be made” – and Vianney Halter, “where I learned that there are no rules and everything is possible! I guess both my work and I acquired some degree of madness there.”

Stepan resigned from his last ‘real job’ at Christophe Claret and returned to his hometown of Helsinki to make his own watches on his own. The first series was ‘Oiva’ – a softer, TV-screen evolution of 2000’s Salpa experiment.


OIvA

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The idea was to make something simple and a bit brutal, but beautiful… like life in Finland.

Like Salpa, Oiva’s cases were made with super-hard Stavax ESR steel, milled from a solid metal rod, rather than stamped from sheets as with cheaper, weaker watches.

Oiva’s myriad three-dimensional dials – some with small seconds, some with Moonphase and stencilled patterns – were all machined from either brass or aluminium, reinforcing the design’s brute strength. Some even had ‘Turbiini’ fan rotors, visible through the back – a world-first invention, now seen elsewhere on the market, for better or worse…

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Oiva is a Finnish adjective for ‘splendid’ or ‘excellent’. Perhaps a sign of

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Like Salpa and Oiva, the chunky cases for Loiste were laboriously milled from solid slabs of Stavax ESR steel – a process that takes plenty of hours, not including polishing. Lesser watch cases are stamped instead of milled, leading to weaker metal, but even if Stepan wanted to stamp, the sheer hardness of Stavax wouldn’t allow him.

LOISTE

The Loiste was not only an evolution of my first Time Tramp pieces, it ‘kickstarted’ the continuation of that Harley-Davidson pinion shape – a shape that has been seen in every one of my watches ever since.

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The Loiste, was named after the Finnish for ‘shine’ or ‘glory’ – perhaps because, to non-petrolheads at least, the kickstart pinion case shape looks quite like the Sun? A foolish train of thought, when you consider the ‘lunacy’ that was to come from Stepan…

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‘Loiste’ painting by artist and friend of Stepan, Jussi Niva (oil on canvas, 2005).

While Loiste’s case shape was ornate, the simple round dial allowed Stepan to start toying with patterns and stencil work. It was also the first time the Moon appeared twice on a Sarpaneva watch dial. The next time would prove to be a watershed for Stepan...

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SuPERNOvA

Prototypes of Supernova’s appropriately star-shaped seconds subdial and its needle-like hand ready for polishing.

The negative spaces of Supernova’s Loiste case are double-curved, requiring extra- careful polishing. Their bright shine contrasts to dramatic effect with the brushed surfaces.

The delicate and skeletal Supernova dial, with polished seconds subdial, ready to be mounted in the Loiste-like kickstart-pinion case. Notice how the aperture at half-past four frames the date.

Like the Loiste and Oiva watches before, Supernova’s modified ETA movement boasts Sarpaneva’s special ‘Turbiini’ winding rotor, which spins with guillotine precision, always coming to rest in alignment with the stencilled-out caseback.

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Supernova means the end of everything, but also a new beginning. By so naming this watch, I was dropping a heavy hint that Sarpaneva Watches had reached a watershed. All would not be the same from here onwards…

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Supernova derives its character from the startling complexity and dynamic, yet brutal beauty of our universe.

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Stepan remembers well the origins of his first properly circular watch: “One night, really late, walking home with my friends, the Moon was full and bright and shining on the openworked iron gratings that surround the trees on my street. For some reason those details just popped into my head and stayed there. So, next day, I started drawing and playing with the form. I made a paper cutout of the gratings’ openworked shape and began piling them one over the other… When l repeated this with metal parts, a friend of mine noticed that it had something suggestive of the ‘corona’ around the Sun’s edge during a solar eclipse. That’s how the dial of the Korona series was formed; just a passing glance at something that you see every single day, but somehow never noticed before.”

There are a things that stay a long time inside my bony head – and when the moment is right I get an idea and start to work on it. With Korona, I guess you could say it was cast iron from outer space!

The 260 holes in the Korona’s skeletonised dial takes hours of hand filing and polishing – a job that requires a steady hand, thanks to the dial’s delicate 0.3 mm thickness.

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KORONA K1

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KORONA K2

The Korona K2 extends K1’s design by removing the movement’s baseplate to achieve an even-more skeletonised effect through the dial, and lending a new ‘rawness’.

The Korona was the first Sarpaneva model to use a modified version of Soprod’s new A10 automatic movement, instead of a standard ETA. “It has a very good potential and because it is not an ETA clone it is more interesting. For some customers it is important that it is not an ETA, and actually for me too.”

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Though inspired by the ironwork of Helsinki’s pavements, Stepan thought the skeletonised dial of his Korona watches were suggestive of a forest, or a cloudy night-time sky, or outer space somehow. “I realised that by putting the Moon under this dial it would allow you to actually ‘see’ the moon approaching its phases, through the branches of a nighttime forest perhaps.”

But how was the Moon to look? Just how did Stepan arrive at that enigmatic, half-smiling, half-scowling visage, which has now become his trademark?

“Everyone here in Finland floats around with an aura of slight melancholy,” Stepan says. “So a smiling Moon was out of the question. Instead, I decided to give the Moon an aura of aristocratic melancholy, with a bit of indecision as to whether he is happy or sad in nature. The expression of the Moon on the Korona K3 just ‘is’ – the same as the people here.”


KORONA K3

The Soprod A10 base calibre is modified and totally re-finished at the Sarpaneva workshop, starting from the main plate, which receives gilding after hand finishing. The separate Moonphase mechanism is designed and manufactured entirely in Helsinki, and features a unique Sarpaneva innovation: correction via the crown, rather than a pusher on the side of the case.

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KORONA K3 bLACK MOON

Inspired by the darkest, most melancholy days of the Finnish winter, the Korona K3 Black Moon is the first watch created that indicates the New Moon, whereas all other Moonphase watches show the Full Moon.

The Korona K3 Black Moon was created in a limited series of 20 pieces, each accompanied by a limited-edition book ‘Black is the Moon’ – a beautifully illustrated poem based on the ancient myth of the demon temptress Lilith, who preys on unwitting men during the New Moon. The whole story was presented to a select group of horological writers and friends one chilly night in January 2009, deep inside Helsinki’s Sea Fortress, on the island of Suomenlinna.

Later that year, Sarpaneva Watches received a prestigious red dot award for the communication design created around this exceptional timepiece, plus two GOOD DESIGN awards from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design for the watch and its product identity.

Black Moon App for adjusting your mechanical watch to the exact Moonphase.

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The Moon bothers me; even if I cannot see it, I can feel it. During the Full Moon and New Moon, I’m especially sensitive… I sleep badly. Am I cursed?

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With RG/WG, Stepan moved away from his beloved steel for the very first time, creating Korona K3 pieces in red gold or white. “One reason was that I made my first watch exactly 10 years ago,” he explains, “and back then I never thought it might mark the beginning of where I am today. Another reason was a more emotional one for me. My father designed jewellery, and in the back of my mind I still have plans to also create some jewellery. So that means that the next step has to be working in precious metals of course.”

Moving on from K1 and K3, Stepan’s signature scallops around the RG/WG case (a soft derivation of the Time Tramp and Loiste’s kickstart-pinion shape) are cut right through, making the gold case even more distinctive.

KORONA K3 RG/WG

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The first steel version of the RG/WG’s scalloped 42 mm case design, the Harvest Moon is matt-coated with diamond-like carbon (DLC), meaning the red-gold Moonphase faces positively glow out of the dusk, just like sky during a Full Moon near the Autumnal Equinox – otherwise known as the large, red ‘Harvest Moon’.

KORONA K3 HARvEST MOON

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Year 2009

KORONA K1SECONd EdITION

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Stepan designed a custom stencil typeface especially for the Korona K1 – a modern, flowing set of numerals very much in keeping with the watch’s case shape.

The second edition of the Korona K1 introduced the new 42 mm case design first seen with RG/WG, plus a central sweeping seconds hand. The dial is available in black diamond coating, imperial blue or rust brown and the case in steel or gold.

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Year 2010

KORONA K2 KAAMOS

The Kaamos edition of the discontinued Korona K2 features a matt-black diamond-like-carbon (DLC) coating on its three-part dial and date disc. The modified Soprod A10 movement within is also perlage- finished, followed by black nickel coating. All of which adds up to a very gloomy affair… just like the Finnish winter.

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Kaamos is a Finnish word for that mystical winter period when the Sun doesn’t rise above the horizon. During these months the land is cloaked only in a dimveil of light, sinking the whole nation into gloom and depression.

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Year 2010

KORONA MOONSHINE

Stepan’s most profuse distillation of the celestial body that bothers him most, Moonshine captures the pale lunar light that is cast onto the gloomy wilderness during Finland’s darkest hours. A top note of northern melancholy, seasoned with lunacy, to be served only to the chosen few.

The Moon just makes me crazy…

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A lonely shack on a remote Finnish island… The gentle drip, drip, drip of a Moonshine distillery within… A pale, eerie light lending a ghostly glow to everything… Like Stepan, you too can fallunder the Moon’s strange spell by watching a short film at www.sarpanevawatches.com

The spirit of the Moon. Captured in gloomy woods during the darkest hours, in the palest Moonlight. Nurtured by noble artisans, distilled to perfection.

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Finnish jazz pianist Iiro Rantala composed a piece of music for the Moonshine film.

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Year 2011Edition of 10 pieces of each dial and case combination

KORONA K3 NORTHERN STARS

Following autumn’s gloomy harvest, nature is quickly ravaged by the cruel and ruthless winter that follows. Soon, all is dark, with only the constellation of the Little Bear lighting Finland’s northern sky. In tribute to this strange and affecting time of year, Stepan launched two varieties of his K3 Black Moon on the first liberating day of 2011’s spring, both flecked with diamonds in the shape of Little Bear. One was inspired by the coldest winter day, with a blue-sky dial; the other harked back to the darkest nights of Finland’s winter, with a pitch-black dial. “It is about the Northern Stars, which I can see during the coldest moments of the Finnish winter, when I look up at the sky from my workshop window.”

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A natural evolution of the Korona K3 Northern Stars, this special edition complements the constellation on the dial with a dazzling dose of sparkle on the case: 283 brilliant-cut diamonds. They were set by Gilles Meier, a master engraver who used bead-setting technique to create a perfect pavé of diamonds. Due to the hardness of steel, this technique is extremely challenging and requires a meticulous mastery of gemstone setting. Some call it madness.

“Routa is a Finnish word for frozen ground. This vicious streak of Mother Nature first numbs the land, then begins to ruthlessly ravage roads and anything else that man has placed in its way.”

KORONA K3 ROuTA

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The dial’s index ‘dots’ and all three hands are coated in luminescent Superluminova paint, meaning your elapsed dive time can be read even in the murky depths of the sea… or indeed the murky depths of the Finnish winter.

Year 2012

KORONA K0

The Korona K0 – Stepan’s first 300 m water-resistant sports watch – is inspired by the Finnish legend of a smith whose daughters were taken by a lecherous underwater creature Näkki. Anxious to save his daughters, the smith wrought himself a unique underwater instrument that told him the very limits of his life and the precise moment of his death: the Ruler of Water.

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The Korona K0’s bezel is directly incorporated into the movement, allowing all functions to be set using its single screwdown crown

The special-edition Korona K0 Wuoksi – named after both ‘high tide’ and ‘for the sake of something’ – features a Moonphase, peering menacingly through the skeletonised dial.

There is a lake for every 29 Finns, so it’s no surprise that we share thousands of tales about the unknown underwater. This watch is made for those unknown depths.

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Text: Alex Doak and Sarpaneva WatchesDesign: Supergroup StudiosReprography: BEE2Printing: Sanomapaino, KouvolaPaper: UPM Fine 70 g/m2

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Copyright © 2012 Sarpaneva WatchesAll rights reserved.

Be ready for thenext generation.

Stepan’s daughter’s sketch for a wristwatch. Who knows where this may lead…

Kiitos kaikille kaikesta.

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The Oddball World of Stepan Sarpaneva