Audemars Piguet

In 1875, in the village of Le Brassus deep in the Vallée de Joux, Jules Louis Audemars and Edward Auguste Piguet began making complicated movements for other houses. A century later their descendants made the most consequential design decision in modern watchmaking: in 1972 they launched Gérald Genta's Royal Oak — a luxury sports watch in steel, octagonal bezel, exposed screws, integrated bracelet, priced above gold watches. The industry thought it was suicide. It created an entire category.

The Royal Oak carried the house through the quartz crisis and now anchors everything from the Offshore's muscle to the openworked grand complications the manufacture builds in the same valley it never left. Audemars Piguet remains family-controlled — with Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin one of the "Holy Trinity," and the only one still in its founders' hands.

The Musée Atelier in Le Brassus, a glass spiral sunk into the meadow, is the house's self-portrait: avant-garde geometry over 150 years of finishing tradition, hand-anglage under sapphire.