The Art of Basse-Taille
What Is Basse-Taille?
Basse-taille — French for “low cut” — is a distinguished enameling technique with roots tracing back as far as the 11th century, when early artisans began experimenting with carving low-relief designs into metal to enhance the visual depth of enamel. The technique involves engraving a pattern into a metal surface and then covering it with translucent or opalescent enamel, allowing light to pass through and reflect off the relief beneath.
It reached new heights during the Renaissance period, a time of extraordinary artistic and technical innovation across Europe. Artists and craftsmen refined basse-taille into a sophisticated art form, combining meticulous hand engraving with layers of enamel to create objects that shimmered with remarkable luminosity and dimension. The interplay between light, color, and engraved texture gives basse-taille its signature brilliance and dynamic depth — qualities that no printed, painted, stamped, or CNC’d dial can replicate.
At 5280 Watch Company, we continue to honor this ancient and intricate art in its purest form, engraving and enameling each dial entirely by hand in our Colorado workshop.
A Mechanical Marvel: The Rose Engine Lathe
At the heart of our basse-taille process lies one of the rarest and most revered tools in traditional horology: a hand-cranked Rose Engine Lathe, built in the early 1900s. These intricate machines were once used to decorate the most prized timepieces and royal artifacts in Europe. Today, they are nearly extinct — and ours lives on, fully restored and operated by hand in Colorado.
The Rose Engine is unlike any modern tool. Its movement is guided by a system of rosettes, cams, and spring-loaded followers that cause the cutting head to oscillate with precise rhythm, producing symmetrical geometric patterns directly into metal. These are not etched by lasers or CNC-milled — they are carved by hand, one pass at a time, by the artisan who turns the crank.
Each dial engraving requires immense concentration and finesse. Depth, spacing, and rhythm are manipulated in real time, as the artisan listens to the tool’s pitch, watches the metal catch light, and feels the vibration in their fingertips. There is no undo button — just mastery, built through hundreds of hours at the lathe.
The result is a shimmering canvas of guilloché — waves, spirals, lattices — ready to be brought to life under enamel. The same shimmering canvas Karl Faberge used to create his signature pieces, the fabled Fabergé eggs for Tsar Alexander III of Russia. It is mechanical poetry, born of hand and steel, and it happens only here, in Colorado.
Vitreous Enamel
Vitreous enamel is a durable, glass-like coating made by fusing powdered glass to metal at high temperatures (750–850°C or 1380–1560°F). The word vitreous comes from the Latin vitreus, meaning “glassy.”
Dating back to ancient Egypt and Greece, enamel has been used for millennia in decorative arts and is especially prized in jewelry-making for its vivid color, shine, and resilience. The process begins by cleaning the metal surface—typically copper, silver, or gold—to ensure proper adhesion.
In the guilloché technique, intricate patterns are engraved into the metal substrate, such as .999 fine silver. Layers of translucent vitreous enamel—essentially powdered glass—are then carefully sifted or painted over the engraved surface and fired. The enamel melts, flows into the fine lines of the engraving, and fuses to the metal. Once cooled, the piece is cold hand-polished to reveal a luminous, glass-like finish.
Jewelry techniques like cloisonné, champlevé, and plique-à-jour further enhance enamel’s versatility, allowing for detailed designs and layered effects. Its vibrant colors and resistance to fading or tarnishing make vitreous enamel a timeless choice for rings, pendants, brooches, and other fine adornments, but especially for watch dials in our case.
Brawn to Match Beauty
The final Basse-Taille dial is protected by sapphire crystals on both sides and housed in a solid, perfectly finished 316L Stainless Steel. Each watch is exclusively powered by top-of-the-line Swiss Sellita movements, meeting COSC Certified Accuracy standards and industry-best D4 finishing.