Key takeaways
• David Candaux has introduced the DC6 Wildfire, a highly exclusive limited edition watch restricted to just eight pieces, priced at 248,000 Swiss francs.
• The watch combines a Grade 5 titanium interior chamber with UD (unidirectional) carbon cladding and features a hand-finished, bright orange sunburst anodized titanium dial inspired by first light over the Risoux ridge.
• Driven by the in-house H74 Caliber, the timepiece incorporates five patents including a 30° inclined flying tourbillon and a retractable pressure-activated “Magic Crown” at 6 o’clock.
The DC6 was made for carbon. A contemporary watch, designed for everyday wear, made for a life on the move. In this collection, the material speaks for itself.
The Night Forest opened the chapter in March 2026: UD carbon, natural titanium, a smoky topaz green dial, eight pieces. The DC6 Wildfire follows it. The same architecture, the same 30° flying tourbillon, the same 45 grams on the wrist, water-resistant to 50 meters. What changes is the hour.
At Le Solliat, the day begins facing the forest. Look toward the Risoux at first light, and you are looking west. The sun comes up behind you, on the far side of the valley, and its first rays strike the ridge head-on. The tops of the spruces take the light before anything else, row after row down the slope, while the valley floor is still in shadow and still cold. For a few minutes the whole line burns orange. Then the light comes down over the pastures, the angle opens, the greens return, and the day begins.
The dial holds those few minutes. Bright orange anodized titanium, at full strength, from the center to the perimeter. Produced in a limited edition of eight pieces.
From Forged Carbon to UD Carbon: The Right Material
Forged carbon is a matter of shavings. Fragments of carbon fibers embedded in epoxy resin, compressed under heat and pressure. The result has presence. The speckled surface catches the light in unpredictable ways. But the structure carries its own weakness: random fibers, a resin acting as a binder, and a binder that eventually gives way. Under prolonged stress, at the edges, or under impact, forged carbon disintegrates. The resin matrix cracks deeply. The chips peel away, slowly, insidiously.
UD carbon, short for unidirectional, is based on a different logic entirely. No flakes, but sheets of continuous fibers. The fibers run through the entire thickness of the material, without interruption. The resin is present but secondary and structurally marginal. Under impact, force travels along the fibers rather than concentrating at the resin-flake interfaces. The material is homogeneous, mechanically coherent, and significantly more resistant to delamination.
Precisely what the DC6 demands, in terms of both durability and aesthetics.
Where forged carbon appears speckled and random, UD carbon reveals itself as veined, striated, and directional. This is the direct result of the internal structure: ultra-thin 30-micron plies stacked with precision, each rotated 45° relative to the previous one. When light glances off the surface, it reveals these successive rotations as regular undulations. The same phenomenon that gives the grain of aged wood its depth and direction.
Combined with titanium, UD carbon gives the watch a virtually eternal lifespan. The right materials are placed in the right places, based on external stresses, to protect the movement best. UD carbon does not scratch easily. It does not disintegrate. It does not develop a patina. In twenty years, the case will be exactly as it is today.
Architecture: Titanium Dressed in Carbon
Carbon is porous. This is a physical reality. The case design accounts for this.
A titanium chamber houses the movement and ensures water resistance. This chamber is then clad: the case band and bezel are made of UD carbon, all held together by titanium stretchers that run the full length of the case and extend naturally into the lugs. No adhesives. A fully mechanical assembly for an aesthetically pleasing timepiece, 45 mm in diameter, water-resistant to 50 meters. A DC6 that weighs 45 grams, robust and built to last.
On the dial, the hand-finished natural guilloché titanium plates —the DC6’s signature since its inception —are framed by a titanium ring coated in black PVD: a play of volumes, materials, and depths. The titanium “Magic Crown” is also capped in carbon.
Blue Titanium: A Surface, Not a Coating
In traditional watchmaking, bluing steel is not a surface coating, but a transformation. The steel is heated to the right temperature, around 300 degrees, and the iron oxidizes naturally. An oxide layer forms, integral to the metal itself, and its thickness determines the color: first straw yellow, then violet, until it reaches the deep blue watchmakers have sought for centuries. Nothing is applied to the steel. It is transformed by heat, from the inside out.
Titanium anodization follows the same principle, with electricity replacing heat. The component is immersed in an electrolytic bath and subjected to a controlled current. Voltage drives the oxidation: a layer of titanium dioxide forms from within the metal’s own surface rather than over it.
This layer is optically transparent. It carries no pigment and absorbs nothing. Light enters it, reflects off two surfaces, and the two reflections interfere, exactly as they do in a film of oil on water. The eye reads that interference as color. What is seen is the metal itself, through its own oxide.
Thickness alone decides which color appears, and voltage alone decides the thickness. Bronze, orange, purple, blue, turquoise, green: as many shades, as many precise voltages. The margin is narrow. A few volts of drift and the color moves to the next one. Nothing can be corrected afterward since there is no layer to adjust. The component is either right or it goes back through the bath.
The tourbillon cage of the DC6 Wildfire is blue anodized titanium. No coating, no PVD, no DLC, nothing added to a cage that weighs 0.35 grams and carries the balance. Nothing to flake, nothing to wear through, no mass added where mass matters most, and no change to the mechanical properties of the titanium. In a hundred years, the cage will be exactly as it is today.
Blue at the cage, orange on the dial. The same bath, the same principle, two voltages.
The Dial: The Color of First Light
The dial is domed, a design dictated by the movement’s architecture. On this surface, the sunburst finish is applied by hand, its striations radiating from the center toward the edges. Light does not reflect uniformly; it shifts with the wrist.
Next comes the anodization. The same bath as the tourbillon cage, held at a different threshold. Orange sits low in the spectrum, on a thin oxide layer, and the window is narrow: a few volts of drift and the color tips toward bronze or violet. On a surface this size, under a dome, any drift is visible at once. The plate is either right or it goes back.
A transparent lacquer is then applied over the entire surface. It does not alter the color. It resonates with the sunburst pattern beneath, amplifying the reflections and adding the depth that anodization alone cannot produce.
The Night Forest dial was built on illusion. A translucent black circle, airbrushed by hand at the base, darkening the eye, reads as depth, a gradient that does not exist. The Wildfire takes the opposite road: no smoke, no shadow at the edges, nothing to soften the color. The orange runs all the way to the perimeter at full strength, the way first light takes the crest of the Risoux, all at once, and the curve of the dial does the rest as the wrist moves.
The numerals and hour markers are applied in black decal, in layers of material. Against the orange, they read instantly, at any angle, in any light. The graduated minute track anchors the eye along the perimeter and holds the composition together. Legibility here is a consequence of contrast, and contrast is the whole point of the piece.
Sensory Experience: Four Textures, One Dialogue
The DC6 Wildfire is read as much with the hands as with the eyes.
The DC6 already stood out for its tactile dimension. The Pointes du Risoux guilloché pattern, hand-executed on titanium using in-house expertise developed to achieve a perfect finish on every motif, can be felt under the finger as much as seen. The sapphire domes draw the eye into the movement. This sensory architecture remains intact in the Wildfire.
We find titanium in the side lugs: bare metal, sharp edges, cold to the touch. Then there is UD carbon: a different material, a different register. Silky is the most accurate word. A surface that the hand perceives as warm, textured, immediate. The “Magic Crown”, made of titanium, is topped with carbon. The transition between the two, under the fingertip, is deliberate—two materials in harmony, complementing one another.
The H74 Caliber
Le Solliat developed the H74 entirely in-house. Bridges and mainplate in Grade 5 titanium, chosen for its natural properties. Corrosion-resistant. Anti-magnetic. Thermally stable. Lightweight. Biocompatible. David Candaux remains the only watchmaker to have implemented this approach across all his movements.
The wheels are made of beryllium copper. The axles, pinions, pins and screws are made of stainless steel. Each component is crafted and finished by hand, in keeping with the savoir-faire passed down in the Valley since 1740.
At the heart of the movement: the flying tourbillon inclined at 30°, completing a revolution in 60 seconds. The inclination serves a mechanical purpose. A wristwatch constantly passes through different positions. The 30° tourbillon processes more of them in less time—a real chronometric advantage on the wrist. The small seconds hand is directly integrated into the cage.
The sapphire case back reveals the movement. The cascading bridges, inclined at 3° relative to the case, create a depth effect that shifts with the light. Eighteen curved recessed angles, each mirror-polished by hand. Straight graining, polished bevels and pearling beneath the bridges.
Power reserve: 55 hours, indicated by a hand at 12 o’clock. The motto “Le Cœur et l’Esprit” inscribed on the indicator. Frequency: 21,600 vibrations per hour. Phillips terminal curve balance spring. Variable-inertia balance wheel with gold adjustment screws.
The “Magic Crown”
Every watch from the David Candaux maison is based on the same visual tension: horizontal symmetry, vertical asymmetry. The balance that Leonardo da Vinci articulated in the Vitruvian Man: natural, pleasing to the eye, faithful to the body’s proportions. To achieve this, the conventional crown at 3 o’clock had to disappear.
The solution draws on the retractable ballpoint pen and its bistable cam: one press to deploy, one press to retract. Simplicity. Robustness. David Candaux developed its own version, tested 28,000 times, equivalent to four presses a day for twenty years, with no measurable wear. The result is a patent: 31 components that condition the entire architecture of the case and movement. The “Magic Crown” at 6 o’clock is the hallmark of every model in the brand’s collection.
Three positions: winding, time setting, neutral. When not in use, it disappears into the case. The watch is adjusted on the wrist with a natural gesture. Water-resistant to 50 meters in all positions.
Contemporary. Mechanical. Essential.
Carbon in this form belongs to aerospace structures, Formula 1 monocoques, and machines engineered to be both lightweight and sturdy—a vocabulary of performance. David Candaux brings it to the wrist with the same logic: a watch for a life in motion, for those who don’t want to feel the weight of what they’re wearing.
But the veined surface of the UD carbon pulls the piece toward nature. It is not the bark; it is the heart of the wood. The same veins, the same lines that run and intersect, the same underlying order found in the trees of the Risoux. The most technical material in this watch is also the one that creates the most direct link to the forest.
The Night Forest was the Risoux at nightfall, green sinking into black under the spruces. The Wildfire is the same forest at the other end of the night. From the workshop, the Risoux stands in the window to the west, and at daybreak it is the first thing the sun reaches. The ridge turns orange while the valley is still grey, and the forest burns without a single flame. It is the shortest event of the day and the one that stays with you.
David Candaux grew up under that ridge and works at its foot. The Risoux gives the guilloché its name and the collection its measure of time. A spruce that will one day become a soundboard takes two hundred years to grow. The fire that runs across it at sunrise lasts ten minutes. Both belong to the same forest, and a watch is where the two scales meet.
The materials hold the tension. Carbon and titanium do not burn, do not fade, do not move. The color of fire on matter that fire cannot reach. This duality, mechanical and natural, contemporary and rooted, is the realm David Candaux works in. It is also, at its core, what the Vallée de Joux has always been: a place where the workshop and the forest face each other.
Limited Edition
Eight pieces. Handmade rubber strap with orange topstitching and Velcro clasp. Price: 248,000 Swiss francs. Unveiled on September 2, 2026. 10-year warranty.
David Candaux
David Candaux, an independent Swiss watchmaker and engineer, embodies horological excellence through his eponymous brand founded in 2017. A native of Vallée de Joux, the cradle of Swiss watchmaking, he stands out for his boundless creativity, singular inventiveness, and exceptional craftsmanship. Based in Le Solliat, his workshop is a hub of creativity and technical innovation, producing watches renowned for the complexity of their mechanisms, their precision, and their unique aesthetics. His commitment to the art of watchmaking is evident in every piece, designed from start to finish with passion, featuring patents that enrich 21st-century watchmaking while perpetuating the legacy of the Valley’s masters. An iconic figure in contemporary independent watchmaking, David Candaux designs watches that speak to the Heart and the Mind.
Technical Specifications
DC6 WILDFIRE
Hand-wound titanium movement with 5 patents
30° inclined flying tourbillon • hours and minutes • small seconds integrated into the tourbillon • power reserve
MOVEMENT
Movement diameter: 35 mm (16 ¼ lines)
Thickness: 6.20 mm
Number of movement components: 287
Tourbillon cage: 29 components
Cage weight: 0.35 g
Watch weight: 45 g
“Magic Crown” crown: 31 components
Number of jewels: 47 • semi-gloss ruby jewels set in solid molded chatons
Power reserve: 55 hours • indicated by a cam system
Barrels: Two fast-rotating coaxial barrels coupled in series, fixed-flange mainspring Balance wheel: Internal variable inertia, gold mean-time screws (10 mm diameter) Frequency: 21,600 vibrations per hour (3 Hz)
Hairspring: Phillips terminal curve • titanium anchor and anchor pin
Bridges and main plate: Titanium • hand-polished beveled angles and chamfers, 18 mirror-polished inward beveled angles, straight-grained, pearling under the bridges • Special hand-finished “Côtes du Solliat” • Cascading bridges
Wheel train: Beryllium-copper wheels • Stainless steel axles, pinions, pins, and screws • Sharp, rounded, diamond-beveled edges on both sides
Movement side: Movement inclined at a 3° angle relative to the case • Black-polished titanium tourbillon bridge, hand-polished bevels and angles • Gold plate with engraved and grained number, polished bevels and moldings, brushed flanks • Yellow gold medallion with bear head logo Tourbillon: Single-axis flying balance wheel inclined at 30° • Cage inclined at 3° relative to the case • 60-second revolution • Blue anodized titanium tourbillon cage
Displays: Hours and minutes at 3 o’clock • Small seconds at 9 o’clock • Power reserve: needle-type window at 12 o’clock
CASE
Architecture: Titanium case clad in UD (unidirectional) carbon • mechanical assembly
Shape: Asymmetrical 6 o’clock – 12 o’clock and symmetrical 3 o’clock – 9 o’clock • Basin-shaped form
Materials: Bezel, middle case, and case back in UD carbon • curved side lugs in microblasted, satin-finished, and hand-polished titanium
Guilloché decorative plates: Hand-finished natural titanium Pointes du Risoux pattern • two plates secured by stainless steel screws
Sapphire domes: Two • tourbillon and small seconds at 9 o’clock, hours and minutes at 3 o’clock Sapphire case back: Large aperture revealing the movement • Clipped olive at 6 o’clock
Case diameter: 45 mm
Case thickness: 11.29 mm
Water resistance: 5 atm – 50 m • water-resistant in all crown positions
Crown: Retractable “Magic Crown” • pressure-activated • 3 positions: neutral, time setting, winding • titanium with UD carbon cap
Dials: Semi-spherical hour and minute sub-dial in bright orange sunburst anodized titanium, protected by a coat of translucent lacquer • Indexes and Arabic numerals applied in black decal • Graduated minute track • Power reserve indicator lacquered in black and zapon with the inscription “Le Cœur et l’Esprit”
Hands: Black anodized titanium hour hand, white lacquered titanium minute hand • tapered and curved hands, hand-beveled and hand-polished • small seconds integrated into the tourbillon, in white lacquered titanium • power reserve: inverted syringe-shaped indicator in white lacquered titanium Strap and buckle: Black rubber, handmade, orange topstitching, Velcro buckle engraved with the David Candaux logo
EDITION
Limited edition: 8 pieces
Price: 248,000 Swiss francs
Warranty: 10 years
Unveiling: September 2, 2026
