Ressence and Marc Newson have designed a watch together for the first time. The TYPE 3 MN takes the brand’s oil-filled TYPE 3 as its foundation and reshapes it through Newson’s language, in a project the two describe as the meeting of two approaches to watchmaking.
Ressence, the Belgian watchmaker founded in Antwerp by Benoît Mintiens, is known for a display made of rotating discs instead of conventional hands, and for filling the dial with oil so the face reads clearly from almost any angle. Newson contributes a design practice spanning furniture, marine, automotive and aviation work across more than four decades.
TYPE 3 MN – Highlights:
A meeting of two design icons
The collaboration grew from a shared interest. Ressence had spent years refining a display in which the dial itself moves, and Mintiens saw in Newson a designer able to bring that engineering into a more considered form. What began as mutual admiration between the two designers became a formal collaboration.
“I wanted to merge our universes,” explains Mintiens. “Knowing Marc Newson’s design universe, I saw a pioneer of industrial-design thinking in fine watchmaking, and that really interested me. I wanted to bring Marc’s and Ressence’s vision of watchmaking into one perfect product.”
The most visible result is the case. Newson drew it as a smooth, elliptical form that wraps the dial, an ergonomic gesture that recalls the continuous, sculptural surfaces he has pursued since the aluminium Lockheed Lounge of 1988.
An oil-filled display driven by rotating discs
Inside, the TYPE 3 MN runs on Ressence’s patented ROCS 3 system — the Ressence Orbital Convex System — in which magnetically driven discs rotate beneath the glass instead of traditional hands turning above a fixed dial. The upper chamber is filled with 4.15 millilitres of silicone oil, cancelling the distortion caused by light refraction and keeping the face legible from any viewing angle. The discs sit on a single curved plane, giving the face the look of a solid instrument rather than a conventional dial with hands.
Like every Ressence, the watch is set and wound through its caseback rather than a crown. There is no side crown to interrupt the elliptical case; the winding and setting action moves to the back of the watch, and the time is read across a dematerialised display in which hours, minutes and further indications are carried by the moving discs themselves.
Marc Newson’s approach to watchmaking
“Ressence watches are a technical tour de force and remain unique in the industry,” says Newson. “The original TYPE 3, in particular, balances clarity with sophistication. With the resulting TYPE 3 MN the perfect representation of my original vision has been realised; the result of a deeply gratifying, collaborative process.”
Born in Sydney in 1963, Marc Newson has remained at the forefront of design for more than four decades, across furniture, marine, automotive and aviation design, architectural projects, timepieces, luxury goods, jewellery and fine-art installations. Works such as the Lockheed Lounge and the Voronoi Shelf sit among the most recognised objects of the postmodern period, and the TYPE 3 MN returns him to the timepiece ideas he has explored through that career.
“I would like this watch to connect with those for whom purity of form, quality of material and complex engineering is prioritised,” he adds, “those who admire, and find beauty in, a refined aesthetic, and find resonance with an object which looks and feels highly considered, coherent and elegant.”
Recognition
The TYPE 3 Marc Newson has been awarded Red Dot: Best of the Best 2026, the highest distinction in the Red Dot Award’s product design category. The result is a watch that keeps Ressence’s engineering at its centre while carrying Newson’s hand through the case: one continuous, elliptical surface wrapped around a display that appears to float inside its oil-filled dial.
Editorial Team
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