Former architect Will Matthysen now sells his one

Nov 11, 2023

Never mind the hills and dales of Switzerland; on the outskirts of Melbourne, Will Matthysen is crafting clocks – cogs to case – and finding international buyers for them.

Verdant Warrandyte, 24 kilometres from Melbourne's CBD, has long been a popular home to painters, sculptors and landscapers. But clockmakers? That said, it only takes one, and the one in this case is former architect Will Matthysen, who decided in 1989 he’d had enough of the drawing board and would rather be creating something more rewarding.

The idea, he tells Watch, had its beginnings when he was a teenager in South Africa. On the mantle in his home was a clock from his father's uncle that seldom worked. He points to the same clock behind him today as we chat, explaining: "We had a very good library in the mining town I grew up in near Johannesburg.

Will Matthysen with his eight-day spring-driven wall clock made from a shipping pallet with wheels of solid oak to a design developed by John Harrison in the early 1700s.

"There were books on clocks and clock repairs, and there was a German watchmaker who worked in the high street. On the way back from school, I used to drop in and see what he was up to. I told him about this clock we had, and he said, ‘Oh, you must take the power down’, and I did what he said, and then it was just basically learning from there."

The jump into creating his own clock came a short time later. "My father was a building contractor, and he had woodworking machinery at home. So I decided to make a clock based on what I’d read. This was the era before the laser-cut things you see these days. I had to make it up as I went along."

Using some offcuts of phenolic resin, a very high-density fibre material, Matthysen worked out a wheel train, scribed out the tooth form, cut them out with a bandsaw and then filed the teeth. "With a lot of fiddling and filing and sorting out, I got it running. That was quite a lovely experience and how I started."

Matthysen began a science degree before switching to architecture, which on graduating took him to Amsterdam then London, with Norman Foster's practice, and on to Hong Kong. Working with Australian contractors there led to his emigrating in 1986, his interest in clocks intact if not all-consuming. "I remember designing one that ended up looking like a building, which is probably not surprising."

During a lull in architectural work, Matthysen joined a woodworking association and began making furniture from his home workshop. He also joined the Australian Antiquarian Horological Society, which held classes in clock repairing.

Handmade wheels, each one constructed from 25 separate pieces.

"When things got quiet I combined technological input from the clock group and from the woodworking group, and started making my own clocks again," he says. "I was getting tired of architecture, working in an office and dealing with bureaucracy, and I found that my happy space was in my workshop doing stuff that I wanted to do."

Matthysen not only gave away architecture but began a year-long full-time clock and watchmaking apprenticeship at RMIT, starting with pocket watch basics.

"The first couple of weeks was just how to sharpen your screwdriver, how to make sure it doesn't slip out and scratch the plates," he says. "Then basic stuff like taking the watch apart, stripping it, putting it in the cleaning machine, putting it back together again, putting it on the timing machine, and adjusting it."

Detail of grasshopper escapement in Acacia rhodoxylon, lignum vitae.

Finicky work to some, but not to a man who delights in hand-crafting nearly every part of his time-telling creations, even the tools that fashion the mechanisms. "I’m making templates or jigs or little tool-holders to make the movement. I’ve worked out a methodology to make it efficient."

To ensure he has parts on hand, he batch-produces the machined components in advance. He gets the cogwork to work in tandem with a beat-keeping pendulum – something that takes not just craftsmanship but painstaking calculation.

"I designed a wheel train that was flexible. I worked out a set of ratios for a great wheel, a centre wheel, intermediate wheel and escape wheel so that I could have a range of pendulums from a half-second pendulum to a one-second pendulum. All the wheels are a standard count of teeth, so the only thing I have to change is the pinion leaf count."

A wall clock in all American timbers.

If this sounds complicated, it surely is. Matthysen cuts two or three sets of pinions in brass before fine-tuning the machine settings and locking it all down. Then he cuts silver steel pinions with coolant or cutting oil.

If a deft touch with gearing, CNC-machining and metalwork is a critical part of the process, it's the woodworking finesse of his bespoke creations and their unabashedly kinetic appeal that's brought Matthysen an international clientele.

His first clients came through exhibitions with wood enthusiasts and the Victorian Woodworkers Association; then a David Jones buyer spotted a clock and installed it as visual merchandising in the men's department; a gallery in Leura, NSW came calling, as did one in Sydney, and the international orders started flowing through them – from the US, Canada, Britain, Japan and China.

"Once I got the exposure it just took off," says Matthysen. "People don't buy the clocks to tell the time, they get emotionally attached, and they become part of people's lives – it's only got to tell the time within a minute or two a week."

Even so, accuracy in such a timepiece is something that requires a deep understanding of the materials you’re working with, particularly the varying qualities of the different woods – a science Matthysen appears more than au fait with.

"A few of the guys at the woodworkers’ group had worked for the CSIRO in the wood products department and they knew all about the organic nature of the material, the cellular structure, how it interacts with moisture. By talking to them and reading a lot, I’ve built up a bit of knowledge on how to deal with that."

A table clock in Tasmanian myrtle, beech and West Australian jarrah.

The finished product might incorporate redgum, sycamore, huon pine and fiddleback blackwood, and vary in size from long-case – think floor standing – to something smaller. Each clock takes two to three months to complete and prices range from $12,000 to $30,000.

"The mechanical components are largely the same, so there's a degree of standardisation, but I modify certain bits to suit different case designs, so the woodwork is always different."

That might mean an escape wheel or gears in a dense wood such as gidgee – and a trip to Matthysen's kitchen stove to deal with moisture stabilisation; he's nutted out his own way of dealing with such issues.

Given such unorthodox but down-to-earth methods, it's no surprise Matthysen demurs when asked about his place in the local clockmaking fraternity. "There are some very fine clockmakers in Australia," he tells Watch, mentioning NSW makers Buchanan Clocks and Deryck Noakes – "an absolute genius" – and Trevor Herbstreit in Bairnsdale, Victoria.

As to his verdict on himself: "It took me a long time to figure out what I was doing and how I ended up where I am now. You know Venn diagrams? One of the circles would be fine woodwork furniture, another circle would be clockmaking or horology, and the other circle, architectural design.

"I’ve sort of overlapped those three. That's where I get the contemporary compositional feel to what I do."

The August issue of AFR Magazine – plus the 36-page Watch special – is out on Friday, July 29 inside The Australian Financial Review . Follow AFR Mag on Twitter and Instagram.

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