Spanish architect and founder of Lebond, a Barcelona-based independent watch brand that applies architectural thinking to watch design.
What it’s like changing scale from livable art to wearable art.
Asier Mateo is a Spanish architect and the founder of Lebond Watches, an independent watch brand based in Barcelona. His background is in architecture — a discipline concerned with proportion, material honesty, structural logic, and the relationship between an object and the person inhabiting it — and this shapes every aspect of how Lebond approaches watch design.
Mateo has spoken about the influence of working alongside iconic architects on his design sensibility, and about the intellectual challenge of changing scale from buildings — objects you move through — to watches — objects worn on the wrist. The leap is not simply one of dimension but of intimacy: a building is experienced at a distance before it is experienced close-up, while a watch is held against the skin and examined at centimetres. Both demand an understanding of proportion, but the watch demands something more personal.
Lebond was founded as an expression of this cross-disciplinary thinking. The brand’s design vocabulary draws on architectural principles: clean geometry, considered materiality, and a rejection of decoration that does not serve a structural or functional purpose. In this respect Lebond occupies a particular position in independent watchmaking — not a brand built by a trained watchmaker extending into design, but one built by a designer extending into watchmaking, bringing with him a set of reference points that the industry rarely encounters.
Mateo has cited Gaudí and other architects whose work blurs the boundary between structure and ornament as influences — not as direct aesthetic references, but as examples of designers who developed entirely original visual languages from first principles. His approach to the watch as an object of spatial and material intelligence, rather than purely a mechanical one, gives Lebond a perspective that is genuinely distinct in the independent landscape.