With the new Excalibur The Metamorph Merlin, Roger Dubuis proves that serious Swiss watchmaking can still be extravagant, theatrical and wonderfully strange.

For the past few years, luxury has been repeatedly instructed to whisper. Logos became smaller, colours quieter, clothes simpler. The highest compliment you could apparently pay an expensive object was that nobody except another person familiar with expensive objects would realise how much it cost.

There is nothing inherently wrong with restraint. But there is also something refreshing about an object that looks at the entire concept of quiet luxury and decides it would rather have twelve miniature knights standing around a mythical forest.

That object is the new Excalibur The Metamorph Merlin from Roger Dubuis.

The 45 mm pink-gold watch is the final chapter in the manufacture’s Merlin trilogy, and subtlety was clearly never invited to the meeting. Its dial is constructed from 57 individual blocks arranged at different heights, combining pink gold, transparent glass and green CVD-coated elements to create an abstract interpretation of a forest. Twelve six-millimetre pink-gold knights surround it, each individually finished by hand. According to the manufacture, finishing a single knight takes around three days.

This time, the storytelling even escapes the dial. The case is hand-engraved with two representations of Merlin: the magician in human form and a white stag, referencing his legendary ability to transform himself.

It is excessive. It is theatrical. It is a little strange.

And that is precisely where Roger Dubuis starts making sense.

For readers who can immediately identify a Royal Oak from twenty metres away but are less familiar with Roger Dubuis, some context is useful.

The Maison was founded in Geneva in 1995 by watchmaker Roger Dubuis and Carlos Dias. Dubuis himself was anything but a newcomer: he had spent decades working in watchmaking and restoring vintage pieces before establishing the company at 57, an age at which sensible people apparently consider retirement rather than founding complicated Swiss watch manufactures.

Within its first decade, the company worked with complications including tourbillons, minute repeaters, perpetual calendars and split-seconds chronographs. Its integrated Geneva manufacture followed in the early 2000s, and the company has since built its identity around combining traditional hand-finishing and complicated mechanical watchmaking with considerably less traditional design.

The important part here is the contradiction.

Roger Dubuis likes extravagance, but the watches are not extravagant instead of being serious pieces of watchmaking. The excess sits on top of some very traditional foundations.

The clearest example is the Poinçon de Genève, or Geneva Seal, which has been closely associated with the manufacture throughout its history and certifies watches according to requirements around provenance, craftsmanship, construction and finishing.

So beneath Merlin, his forest and his tiny golden army, the Metamorph Merlin contains the automatic RD821 calibre, manufactured and hand-finished in-house. It consists of 172 components, offers a 48-hour power reserve and uses 14 different finishing techniques. The movement carries the Poinçon de Genève.

That combination explains the brand better than almost any manifesto could: traditional watchmaking, followed by a complete refusal to make it look traditional.

The Knights of the Round Table are not a new eccentricity. Roger Dubuis introduced the concept in 2013, and the collection has since become a recurring showcase for métiers d’art, micro-sculpture and unusual materials. The basic idea remains wonderfully absurd: twelve sculpted knights replace conventional hour markers, gathered around a “table” that changes radically between editions.

Metamorph Merlin concludes a trilogy that began with The Omniscient Merlin in 2024 and continued with The Enchanter Merlin in 2025. The latest chapter moves from Merlin’s knowledge and magic towards transformation, using the forest and the white stag to represent metamorphosis.

You can care deeply about Arthurian mythology or not at all. The more interesting point is what Roger Dubuis is doing with it.

A mechanical watch stopped being the most practical way to know the time a very long time ago. Once you accept that, watches at this level are free to become other things: demonstrations of craft, miniature sculpture, engineering experiments, cultural references, personal obsessions. The Metamorph Merlin takes that freedom unusually literally.

It isn't trying to disappear into an outfit. It is trying to create an entire world within 45 millimetres.

There is also the question of who actually wants a watch like this.

Not everyone. Clearly.

And perhaps that is one of its strengths.

There are watches people buy partly because everyone understands them. Recognition is useful. An established silhouette on the wrist can communicate taste, success or belonging before its owner has said a word.

Roger Dubuis operates differently. A Knights of the Round Table watch feels more relevant to someone who no longer needs that immediate recognition. Someone who probably knows the classics, may already own some of them, and has reached the point where collecting becomes less about assembling the accepted answers and more about discovering their own.

The Metamorph Merlin is limited to 28 pieces. Press Release_From Legend to Ha… Someone choosing one is therefore unlikely to be searching for the safest possible response to the question, Which luxury watch should I buy?

It says something quite different about its owner.

You like objects with stories. You are comfortable with attention. You don't particularly need everyone in the room to recognise what is on your wrist, but you probably enjoy the possibility that the right person will. Most importantly, you have reached the rather liberating stage where personal taste matters more than universal approval.

That is where maximalism becomes interesting.

Not as an excuse to add more diamonds, more gold or more zeros to a price tag, but as permission for craftsmanship to have personality.

There will always be a place for the beautifully proportioned watch that quietly disappears beneath a cuff. There should be. Restraint can require enormous confidence and extraordinary craft.

But the opposite can be true too.

The Metamorph Merlin takes traditional techniques and uses them to make something deliberately fantastical. Its twelve knights are hand-finished. Its miniature landscape is assembled from dozens of individual components. Its calibre is finished according to demanding Genevan traditions. Then Roger Dubuis puts all of it into a large pink-gold watch about a medieval wizard who turns into a deer.

Somehow, the contradiction works.

Because perhaps haute horlogerie does not always need to prove its sophistication by behaving itself.

Sometimes more really is more.