At eighteen, his mother sends him alone to South America. To flee, to hope for a better future. For at that time, rising tensions across the continent foretold an imminent war…

Before his departure, she entrusts him with their only treasure: a pocket watch.

He steps across the threshold, casting one last glance at his family frozen behind the glass. He will never see them again.

In Argentina, young Mr. Calich becomes a laborer, then a merchant, then a respected man. He learns quickly. He listens. The watch never leaves his side. It becomes a symbol: of a man who had nothing, and built everything. It is passed down, always to the eldest of the family without interruption, to this day. On its case, an enigmatic engraving one no one has ever been able to read.

Normandy, France
A solitary, dreamful child lifts his gaze toward the winter sun.
Through the classroom window, he watches the frost melt from the branches. Birds resume their song.
Day after day, he learns to read the time of nature, fascinated by this discreet yet grand spectacle.
He does not know it yet, but this attentive gaze will become his strength.

The boy has become a man. He crosses the Australian desert alone, on a motorcycle. His only guides: a compass and the sun.

Years of observation have taught him to master his art. Each evening, he drives a stick into the ground and reads its shadow like a primitive clock. He measures time through the rhythm of the stars, the silence of the desert, the traces of passing animals.

It is there, at the crossroads of worlds, that he meets an anthropologist, passionate about the story of humanity. Audacious, she has just crossed the Pacific under sail. Argentinian by birth, she is by a strange coincidence the great-granddaughter of Calich the pioneer.

They join their lives. Their stories intertwine.
Together, they imagine a timepiece, one carrying a profound symbolism, born of ambition, and rooted in the poetry of nature.

They do not seek to reproduce time through the regularity of a mechanism, but to let it reveal itself freely elusive, alive through a watch.

Eight years of silence and searching. Of fertile failures, refinement, and perseverance.

All of this was needed to give birth to the masterpiece of a lifetime.

From this quest emerges the confidential Maison Augé. Anchored in the discreet tradition of French luxury,  it was founded in the Gulf of Morbihan, where the ceaseless tide reveals the rhythm of time.

Creators of totems for pioneers, those who, to build the world of tomorrow, must return to the essential and live in symbiosis with their environment.