Hublot and Daniel Arsham make a splash

Intent on designing a timepiece for Hublot that was rule-breaking and aesthetically contrapuntal, over a two and half year gestation period, Arsham took a willfully, elegantly irregular approach, deploying counter culture material choices and a Gaudi-goes-scifi architecture.

The Arsham Splash is, as the designer likes to say, 'a time collapser'. 'You’re not quite sure if it’s an object from the past or the future. Perhaps the most striking thing about the Splash is the matte sapphire,' Arsham says. 'Crystal samples come as flat tiles with different clear and colour possibilities but I noticed that the reverse of the sample was matte and unpolished. That’s what we used.'

Experimenting with the miniaturising constraints of watchmaking, Arsham developed the Splash around Hublot’s new and compact Meca-10 in-house movement. 'I sat with a drawing of the movement, laying over tracing paper, experimenting with scale and shapes, trying to make something new, unusual and atypical.'

The final version pushed the envelope of the form within conventional sizing and boundaries. The Splash's distinctive asymmetrical 42mm titanium case houses the movement, its polished machinery visible through both the dial and the sapphire caseback.

Hublot MP-17 MECA-10 Arsham Splash Titanium Sapphire is limited to 99 pieces and costs around £57,000

hublot.com

This article is taken from the December 2025 Entertaining Issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 6 November. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today