The week the watch fairs take over Geneva is the week the city stops belonging to its residents. Hotel rates triple. Restaurant tables vanish. The lakefront fills with people who have flown a long way to look at objects the size of a coin, and the whole thing runs on appointments that were confirmed months earlier.
Most of what matters happens away from the halls. A manufacture in the Vallée de Joux, an hour out through the Jura, where six people assemble movements in a room quieter than a library, and where a visit is arranged through a relationship rather than a form. An auction preview where you are permitted to handle pieces before they go under the hammer. A dinner in a private house on the Right Bank at which three of the guests happen to design the things everyone else spent the day photographing.
None of it appears in a programme. All of it is coordination.
The practical shape of such a week is unromantic. A driver who understands that the Vallée de Joux in January is a different proposition from the Vallée de Joux in April, and who has snow tyres before you ask. A hotel room booked in the previous autumn. Appointment times spaced so that a fifteen minute conversation that turns into an hour does not collapse the afternoon. Somewhere to leave a purchase safely, and someone who knows the customs position on carrying it home.
Collectors tend to arrive with the pieces already decided. What they usually lack is time, and the week punishes anyone improvising.
We plan these weeks from Zurich, two hours away by train, in relationships built over years rather than assembled for the occasion.
The days on either side of a fair are the ones people underplan. French Switzerland is how we usually fill them.