Trippin’ out with time: Franck Muller Crazy Hours watches

Franck Muller watches are kind of like a front running celebrity–love ‘em or hate ‘em, you know when they’ve walked into a room. While my own interest in Franck Muller timepieces has almost always been confined to a kind of goggle-eyed amazement with some of their super-complicated showpieces, I also find myself in admiration of the creative complications that Franck Muller comes up just to reinvent the basic function of telling the time. Of course, what other Franck Muller watch could I be talking about but the Crazy Hours? One look at the psychedelic, multi-colored dials with their seeming random arrangement of hours, and you might wonder if Tim Leary and the white rabbit from Wonderland were part of the design process. Of course, there’s a lot of mechanical ingenuity and order involved in producing this seemingly jumbled arrangement, which is exactly the paradox that makes the whole concept so cool.