MB&F CEO Max Büsser invited 60 Minutes into the M.A.D. House, a converted 1907 lakeside home near Geneva that now houses design studios and watchmaking workshops. What was once a private residence is a laboratory where traditional watchmaking techniques meet contemporary digital design, and where ideas born in Büsser’s imagination are turned into functioning, often whimsical, mechanical timepieces.
Büsser, an engineer who runs his brand with an artist’s instinct, refuses to call his creations ordinary watches. He prefers the term horological machines, emphasizing that each object must be reliable enough to survive generations while also expressing sculptural playfulness. The M.A.D. House embodies that duality: centuries-old, hand-operated tools sit alongside CAD stations and precision 3D printers, and craftspeople move between microscopic hand-finishing and modern fabrication methods.
Design begins in Max’s head, is developed as 3D models and printed prototypes, then painstakingly translated into metal, gears and springs. Development timelines are long. A single machine once consumed more than 3,000 hours of one craftsman’s work over four years. Even smaller projects commonly require 12 to 18 months to produce components and several weeks to assemble a finished watch. Some movements contain upward of 600 individual parts. These timeframes reflect an insistence that projects proceed until they meet exacting creative and technical standards rather than until they hit efficiency targets.
Büsser often compares the first winding of a finished movement to a birth. When the watchmaker gives the mainspring tension and the balance wheel begins to oscillate, the piece comes to life. The balance wheel itself is a recurring obsession for Büsser, and several of his legacy machines expose flying or prominently displayed balance wheels that become hypnotic focal points on the wrist.
Inspiration for the forms is eclectic. The HM-11, nicknamed the Architect, draws on postmodern architectural ideas: its case reads like a tiny building with separate rooms for hours and minutes, a power-reserve indicator and even a mechanical thermometer, while the crown is integrated into the overall case geometry. Because of such complex cases and novel structural solutions, some concepts can take as long as five years to evolve from sketch to wrist-ready object.
MB&F deliberately avoids the standard corporate playbook of scaling and efficiency. The company operates more like an art studio: projects continue until they satisfy both creative ambition and technical rigor, and prices reflect that labor and uniqueness. Many pieces sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Büsser hopes collectors value them as works of art and heirlooms rather than merely speculative assets.
Inside the workshops, watchmakers hunched over magnifiers manipulate components so tiny they resemble seeds. The work blends meticulous hand-finishing and age-old horological techniques with selective use of contemporary tools like high-precision 3D printing. Büsser stresses responsibility: a mechanical watch, if sold as an heirloom, must be engineered and finished to last. At the same time, the M.A.D. House embraces eccentricity, producing timepieces that are at once mechanical marvels and kinetic sculptures, built to be admired, worn, and passed down.