As the director of research and development of watches for Van Cleef & Arpels, Rainer Bernard oversees production of the brand’s timepieces. But when he is working on a new addition to the brand’s collection, his focus goes well beyond horology.

“It’s never a watch by itself — it’s always a piece of jewelry, or a piece of high jewelry, at the same time,” Mr. Bernard said in a phone interview from his office at the brand’s watchmaking atelier in Meyrin, Switzerland, about five miles northwest of Geneva’s city center.

“Here, we don’t even talk about watchmaking,” he said, with a 42-millimeter rose gold wristwatch, first designed by Pierre Arpels in 1949 and issued in 2012, on his wrist. “We talk about nice stories that we want to convey into a product.”

That mind-set comes across most clearly in Van Cleef’s high jewelry watches, which frequently feature dials with elaborate motifs like moving figures or flowers rendered in enamel, diamonds and other gems.

Consider, for example, the Lady Arpels Ballerines Musicales, introduced in 2020 (although ballerinas have been a recurring house theme since the early 1940s). There are three designs, with varying prices, including one with nearly eight carats of diamonds, at 438,000 Swiss francs ($477,000).

Each dial depicts a theater stage, with guilloché-patterned curtains that part on demand to reveal five ballerinas who move to a brief soundtrack of compositions by Fauré, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky (the house worked with Michel Tirabosco, a pan pipe player, on that element). The watch does, of course, tell time: on a slender crescent-shaped display at the top of the dial.

The design, Mr. Bernard said, took nearly a decade to perfect.

And each watch in the Lady Arpels Heures Florales collection, which debuted last year, features a dozen small enamel flowers that open in different combinations to mark each hour.

Several prototypes were discarded during the complex creation process, which spanned five years. “It happens all the time because the watches we make are so different,” Mr. Bernard said. “You cannot just open a book and have a look at how you should do that.”

“The idea to go into unknown territories that you never have been to — this is what drives us,” he added.

Clearly, that applies to what the brand calls its Extraordinary Objects, a collection of automatons and unusual creations like the Planétarium, a tabletop timepiece 66.5 centimeters (about 2 feet) in diameter. It includes an automaton, under a dome that makes the whole piece 50 centimeters (about 1.6 feet) high, depicting part of the solar system in gold and gems including diamonds, sapphires, jasper and garnets. When the piece is turned on, each planet moves at its actual speed of rotation.

Mr. Bernhard considers Planétarium to be a highlight of his work at the brand, along with watches like the Heures Florales and the Lady Arpels Papillon Automate, a 2017 introduction that involved four patents and is decorated with a butterfly whose enamel wings flutter as the wearer’s wrist moves.

Such designs distinguish Van Cleef & Arpels from other watchmakers, including the other watch brands owned by the Richemont group, such as A. Lange & Söhne and IWC Schaffhausen, and even Cartier.

Differentiation, experts say, is a strategic goal of corporations like Richemont.

“They’re trying to think how to diversify across the different brands and segment at different customer bases,” said Ryan Raffaelli, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. “This is true across a lot of these groups, that each plays a very specific role within.”

At Van Cleef & Arpels, three teams are involved in the conception, design and promotion of watches: jewelry artisans and marketers, headquartered in Paris, and the watch-focused staff, in Meyrin. They work on the brand’s less elaborate timepieces — like the Perlée collection, with delicate beading on the dial — as well as its high jewelry creations.

Part of Mr. Bernard’s role is to work among all three teams.

“It’s very much a diplomacy position where you have to understand technical things,” said Ariel Adams, founder of the watch website aBlogtoWatch. “A lot of it is being a liaison and understanding what each of these individual teams needs and how they’re motivated.”

The job requires proficiency in “the language of flowers and the language of wheels and levers and engineering,” said Nicolas Bos, Van Cleef’s president and chief executive.

And Mr. Bernard, Mr. Bos added, “has this ability to speak both” fluently.

“He’s one of these guys who probably would not be so happy, and maybe not at their top potential, if they were only working in just one area,” he added.

Working collaboratively suits Mr. Bernard, who is quite private and reticent to take credit. “It’s not me that’s developing the pieces,” he said. “We are a whole team.”

However, he noted, “It’s like in a movement. Everybody’s one wheel only. Don’t get a big head, and just stay with the feet on the ground.”

Mr. Bernard, who is in his mid-50s but declined to give his exact age, grew up in Germany, not far from Frankfurt and near the country’s border with France. That geography, plus studying at a German-French school, gave him an ease with the French language and culture that he said has come in handy, as many of Van Cleef’s operations are conducted in French.

“My name is even French,” he said.

He grew up in a home that was decorated with his father’s collection of cuckoo clocks, one of which now hangs in his Meyrin office, loudly making its distinctive birdlike sound at one point during the interview.

“In our house, whenever the hour changed, it was really noisy,” he said. “We had all the cuckoos going off all the time.”

As a child, he said, he was fascinated by the way things work. “Since the youngest age, I de-assembled things, whatever was mechanic — little machines, little toys,” he said. “I loved my miniature trains. And I was always involved in assembling, understanding, analyzing little machines.”

That passion has been at the core of his academic studies and early career. In 1999, he earned a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Munich. Soon afterward he worked at the laser and optoelectronics companies CILAS and the Qtera Corporation, which specializes in optical communication technology; in between, he spent time at a fiber optics-focused start-up, but it failed to get off the ground.

Mr. Bernard lives in Geneva with his partner and their two teenage children. The family moved there in 2006, when he became the head of mechanical development at Piaget, his first position in the watch industry. He left in 2011 to join Van Cleef.

Rather than feeling constricted by working at a 117-year-old company, with all its history and traditions, Mr. Bernard said that he and his staff thrive on creating timepieces that fit the brand’s legacy.

“We are very, very happy to have this heritage because it enables us to have a handrail that you can use,” Mr. Bernard said. “You hold on to that handrail — you have a good stand. And from that on, you can actually go and change things and move things around.”

The goal, he added, is to create timepieces that “in 10, 20, 50 years you can say, ‘OK, this is perfectly in line with the heritage.’”