Hands-on with the Renaud Tixier Monday Skeleton

The Micro-Rotor Problem, Solved in Full View

By Gabe Reilly · Photos by Blake Buettner

We went hands-on with the Renaud Tixier Monday Skeleton, in both the blue and green editions, at Geneva Watch Days last month. Our thesis going in was simple: this is the Monday fully realized. Everything the original Monday was doing under a closed dial, the micro-rotor system and the hand finishing behind it, is now on full display. Having spent real time with both pieces, we think that thesis holds.

Two Watchmakers, One Name

Renaud Tixier is not a typical independent brand, and you can't really talk about what it's doing without talking about who's behind it. Dominique Renaud has been in this industry for close to 40 years. His claim to fame is Renaud et Papi, the firm he co-founded in 1986 that quietly engineered an enormous share of the complicated watchmaking that came out of the 1980s and 90s, much of it eventually absorbed into Audemars Piguet. By Renaud's own account, Renaud et Papi is responsible for something like 25 distinct horological breakthroughs. For context, a watchmaker who's credited with one or two real breakthroughs in their career gets remembered as a legend. Renaud has two dozen plus to his name, and he hasn't stopped inventing.

Julien Tixier is younger, in his early 30s, and came up as a restorer, which means he can make almost anything by hand because restoring old complicated watches demands it. He's also behind real horological achievements in his own right, including the Tempesta Fugit, a secular perpetual calendar, and he's consulted on complications for other independent brands. Where Renaud is the engineer with the breakthrough ideas, Tixier is the craftsman who can render those ideas by hand at the highest level. That pairing is the whole premise of Renaud Tixier.

The brand itself is structured around seven planned watches, one per day of the week, each one built to solve a specific horological problem. The Monday was the first, introduced in 2024, and it solved the micro-rotor's oldest limitation.

The Micro-Rotor Problem, Solved

Micro-rotors exist because they let a display caseback show off the movement's architecture without a full-size rotor sweeping over everything, and because they can make a caliber thinner. The tradeoff has always been winding efficiency. A full-size rotor is heavy enough and swings with enough inertia to wind a mainspring efficiently. A micro-rotor is smaller, so winding efficiency drops, which is part of why brands reach for dense metals like platinum or tungsten in micro-rotor construction: more mass, more inertia, more winding force per swing.

Renaud's breakthrough was to stop treating the rotor's resting moments as dead time. The Monday's caliber houses a flywheel, nicknamed "the dancer," coupled to a propulsion spring and seated inside the platinum micro-rotor, in the space that's normally just left empty. When the rotor itself stops moving, the flywheel keeps spinning and keeps feeding energy into the mainspring barrel. Watch it in person and it's genuinely strange to see: the rotor sits still while the barrel keeps winding. The system also includes a declutching mechanism that protects the movement from shock, so the efficiency gain doesn't come at the cost of durability.

It's a real, patented solution to a problem that's dogged micro-rotor construction for as long as micro-rotors have existed, which is exactly the kind of thing Renaud Tixier says it exists to do: not watchmaking for its own sake, but watchmaking aimed at solving something specific.

Now You Can Actually See It

Here's where the Skeleton earns its name and its place in this lineup. The original Monday's architecture was, by Renaud Tixier's own account, practically begging to be skeletonized from day one. The 2026 Skeleton, built around the new RVI2025 caliber, finally does it: all 262 components of the movement are now visible, and every one of them is finished and decorated by hand. That includes 238 hand-finished inward angles, which is the kind of detail that separates a watch that merely looks open-worked from one that was actually built to be looked into.

Julien Tixier's Half of the Equation

It's worth being specific about what "hand-finished" means here, because it's doing a lot of work in this watch, and because it's really the other half of the Monday Skeleton's whole premise. Dominique Renaud solved the engineering problem. Julien Tixier built the original Monday prototype himself and set the finishing standard the rest of the watch lives up to.

Tixier came up as a restorer, not a production watchmaker, which matters more than it sounds like it should. Restoring old complicated watches means that when a part is missing or damaged, you can't order a replacement. You make one, by hand, to match work that was itself done by hand decades or a century earlier. That background gives him a command of traditional finishing techniques that most watchmakers working today never have to develop, because most watchmakers today are building new parts to spec, not reverse-engineering old ones from scratch.

Each Monday Skeleton is built and hand-finished by a team of watchmakers at Renaud Tixier's Tolochenaz workshop, working under Tixier's supervision, to the standard he set with that original prototype. You can see it throughout the watch: black polishing, beveling, the hand-chased and engraved bridge over the barrel ratchet, the stippled engraving along the case flanks, none of it reading as applied decoration. It reads as a watchmaker organizing a mechanically dense movement so the eye actually knows where to look, which is a much harder problem than just polishing every surface to the same high standard.

It's also worth noting that this finishing philosophy extends to outside artisans where it makes the watch better rather than insisting everything happen in-house: an enameler for the mainspring barrel caps, an engraver for the case-flank stippling. That approach, prioritizing the best possible result over who gets credit for it, is part of why the Monday Skeleton feels less like one watchmaker's showcase and more like a genuinely collaborative object, built to one person's standard for what "finished" actually means.

With the dial closed, the original Monday was mostly Renaud's watch: you got the pitch for the flywheel system, and you had to take the finishing underneath on faith. Open it up, and the Skeleton becomes something closer to a 50/50 proposition. Renaud's mechanism is still the reason this watch exists. But Tixier's finishing standard is now on full display, and that balance is exactly what "fully realized" should mean for this watch.

Two Colorways, One Case

Both editions we handled share a 40.8mm case in 18ct grey gold, 12.6mm thick, with hand engraving running along the caseband and between the lugs. The dial is a skeletonized dauphine-hand layout with a satin-finished small-seconds counter and a brush-finished rehaut, faceted appliqués on its lower level and a white minute track on the upper. The blue and green editions differ only in that accent color, which carries through the small-seconds counter, the rehaut, and the hand-stitched alligator strap. Each edition is limited to 15 pieces.

On the wrist, the case wears exactly as you'd want a 40.8mm dress-adjacent watch to wear: present without being heavy, and legible despite the amount going on underneath the dial. That's Tixier's hand-finishing doing real work, not just decorating the movement but organizing it visually so the eye has somewhere to land.

Final Thoughts

What makes the Monday Skeleton worth paying attention to isn't just that it's beautiful, though it is. It's that Renaud Tixier is explicit about what each watch in this seven-piece collection is for: solving a real, specific problem in watchmaking, then rendering that solution with a level of hand-finishing that holds up next to anything at this level of independent watchmaking. The Monday solved the micro-rotor's efficiency problem in 2024. The Monday Skeleton is the same watch finally allowed to show its work, and once you've seen that flywheel do its thing through an open dial, it's hard to imagine wanting the closed version instead.

Specs

• Case: 40.8mm, 18ct grey gold, 12.6mm thick, 21mm lug width, hand engraving on caseband and between lugs
• Water Resistance: 30 meters (3ATM)
• Movement: Renaud Tixier RVI2025, automatic, platinum micro-rotor with flywheel ("the dancer") winding system, declutching shock protection
• Power Reserve: 72 hours minimum
• Frequency: 2.5 Hz (18,000 vph)
• Jewels: 29
• Components: 262, all hand-finished and decorated
• Inward Angles: 238, hand-finished
• Function: Hours, minutes, small seconds
• Finishing: Black polishing, bridge rounding, beveling, Côtes de Genève, sunray finishing, circular graining; hand-engraved and chased barrel ratchet bridge in grand feu enamel
• Dial: Skeletonized, dauphine-style hands (polished and satin-finished), brush-finished rehaut with faceted appliqués and white minute track
• Strap: Hand-stitched alligator leather (blue or green), 18ct white gold pin buckle
• Limited Edition: 15 pieces per colorway

The Renaud Tixier Monday Skeleton is available now in blue and green editions at collectivehorology.com, alongside the rest of the Renaud Tixier collection.