I don’t remember a time when watches weren’t part of my life.
Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the floor of my garden shed, surrounded by tiny screws, springs, and gears, trying — unsuccessfully — to put his old pocket watches back together. I must have been six. I had no tools, no manuals, no real understanding of what I was doing. Just curiosity. And a stubborn determination to figure things out.
Those watches belonged to my grandfather, Marcello Bogner. He never scolded me for taking them apart, even when I couldn’t put them back together. I think, in his own way, he understood that something had already been set in motion.
A year later, when I was seven, I spent a long stretch in the hospital. To pass the time, I filled sketchbooks with watch designs — case shapes, dials, imaginary complications. Quartz watches were everywhere at the time, and I was fascinated by them. The nurses used to stop by just to look at my drawings. I still remember their faces when they realized I wasn’t just doodling — I was designing.
At home, I would search through every magazine I could find, flipping pages only to stop at the watch advertisements. My mother, a professor, was far less impressed. She would gently remind me that books were far more important than “those silly watches.” She wasn’t wrong — but she also didn’t know yet that this obsession wasn’t going anywhere.
As I grew older, design became the common thread that tied everything together. I studied architecture across two continents and eventually became a licensed architect in multiple states. Architecture taught me discipline, structure, and responsibility. It taught me how to manage complexity, how to coordinate teams, and how to bring ideas into the real world without losing their essence.
But no matter how deep I went into architecture, watches never left my mind.
Even during my studies, while others were building furniture or scale models, I was in the workshop using heavy machinery to fabricate small watch prototypes — mostly to entertain myself, sometimes to the amusement (and concern) of my classmates. I’ve always had this impulse to make things real, to touch them, test them, and push them beyond the sketch.
Over time, my professional life grew more demanding. I designed buildings of all types, managed teams, coordinated trades, and learned how to protect a vision through the chaos of real-world constraints. That experience shaped me deeply. It taught me discipline, patience, and how to defend an idea without diluting it.
But the watches never left me.
For more than twenty-five years, I kept sketching timepieces. Some were elegant, some completely unbuildable, some wildly impractical. I was — and still am — my own harshest critic. I revise, refine, discard, and start over. That process taught me to develop a design language rooted in architecture: proportion, geometry, rhythm, and structure.
I come from two very different design educations. One taught me that concept and narrative are everything. The other taught me that history, rules, and precision matter just as much. When those two worlds collide, something interesting happens. I set constraints. I create rules. I make the design almost fight back at me. And in that struggle, the final form emerges — not as a compromise, but as a resolution.
I don’t believe in post-rationalizing design. If something needs to be explained away, it’s probably wrong. Good design should justify itself through coherence and intention. Every line must have a reason. Every surface must belong.
People often say my work feels architectural, and that’s true. It’s structured. Purposeful. Controlled. But inside that structure is emotion — tension, rhythm, personality. That’s where I live as a designer.
Eventually, after years of balancing architecture and passion, life pushed me toward a decision. A few pivotal moments — the kind that quietly change your trajectory — made it clear that it was time to stop treating watchmaking as a parallel universe and start giving it the attention it had always demanded.
That’s when Bogneri truly began.
Not as a business plan, but as a natural continuation of who I am. A place where everything I’ve learned — design, architecture, obsession, discipline, curiosity — could finally converge.
Bogneri isn’t just something I created. It’s a reflection of how I think, how I work, and how I see the world. Every watch carries a piece of that journey. Every detail is intentional. And every creation is, in its own way, a quiet conversation between my past and the future I’m still building.
