REMONTOIR is a fictional Vallée de Joux watchmaker. The background is a working mechanical movement drawn on canvas — a gear train the mainspring turns, an escapement beating at a real 4 Hz, and a live counter of every swing since you arrived. The site is, functionally, a clock.
Watch brands photograph movements; this one runs one. The design borrows haute horlogerie's exact visual language — Vallée de Joux navy, guilloché silver, blued-steel screws, gold wheels, ruby jewels — and spends the interactivity on the single thing a photo can never show: the beat. Even the house name is a complication (the remontoir d'égalité).
Every colour is a real movement material — the blued steel is the pallet fork, heated to exactly the right temperature; the gold is the wheel train; the red jewels are synthetic ruby.
Cormorant Garamond — display. The engraver's serif of a dial, set with tabular figures so the numbers align like a chronograph scale.
Inter — body and the technical caps, tabular-lined for the specifications.
| Element | How it works |
|---|---|
| Gear train | Five meshing wheels drawn on canvas with true involute-ish teeth and five-spoke crossings, each rotating at a ratio that steps up from the slow mainspring barrel to the fast fourth wheel — the actual gearing order of a going train. |
| Escapement | A club-tooth escape wheel indexes one tooth per beat, and a blued pallet fork rocks on a sine at the beat frequency — the mechanism that turns continuous spring force into discrete ticks. |
| Real 4 Hz | The movement runs at 28,800 vph — 8 beats per second — timed off performance.now(), and the hero counts every swing since page load. It is genuinely keeping time. |
| Materials | Gold wheels, guilloché-silver spokes, blued-steel fork, ruby jewels at the bearing points, and a faint gold plate-glow — the finish vocabulary of a hand-decorated calibre. |
| Accessibility | Reduced motion stills the train and fork (a technical drawing rather than a running movement) and stops the beat counter's flash; the specifications remain exact and in text. |
| You do | The page does |
|---|---|
| Arrive | The mainspring drives the train, the escapement beats, and the counter starts at zero |
| Stay a while | The beat count climbs at exactly 8 per second — the watch does not care that you're reading |