TEL AVIV — Watchmaking was in Itay Noy’s professional D.N.A. long before he took up the craft. He just didn’t know it.

Only through a chance correspondence with a great uncle a few years ago did he discover that watchmaking was part of his family’s history before World War II. And that story still shapes Mr. Noy’s work today at his studio and boutique along a cobblestone stretch of the Old Jaffa neighborhood here.

“There are a lot of artists in our family,” Mr. Noy, 43, said. “My grandmother was one of the first graphic artists in Israel, and my father was a painter. He and his siblings all studied at Bezalel,” the national academy of arts and design in Jerusalem.

After his army service, the Israeli native got a job in a watch store, fell in love with timepieces and went to Bezalel himself to study design.

It was winning the 2007 Andrea M. Bronfman Prize for Contemporary Crafts, known as the Andy, that really solidified Mr. Noy’s career rise. The Andy is a major award in Israel and includes an exhibition for the artist and 50,000 shekels, or about $12,000.

Nirit Nelson, head of the 2007 Andy jury, wrote that Mr. Noy had won because his work “tells us a great deal about time and the way we experience it. His thought-provoking works are masterpieces.”

Mr. Noy recalled that “after I won the Andy prize, my grandmother and grandfather said that I should send the catalog from my exhibition at the Eretz Israel Museum to my grandmother’s brother in London.

“I remember as a child that he would come to Israel and give us watches as gifts,” he said. “He called me and was very excited to tell me that his father had been a watchmaker.”

That surprised Mr. Noy, but Jewish family history from that era has often been obscured, he said.

“You have to understand that people who came from Germany erased everything,” he said. “They didn’t speak German; they didn’t tell us younger people anything. If we asked them anything about the past, they would say, ‘No, no. You don’t want to hear about it.’ ”

But learning this piece of family history changed his career, giving his designs more of an artistic and philosophical flair, he said.

“It was like discovering a treasure to know that I had a background in watchmaking,” Mr. Noy continued. “He even sent me a photo of his father working in Italy and sent me a watch his father gave him when he was 15, when they smuggled him from Germany to England.”

Mr. Noy designs his watches and makes the cases and dials, using movements made by ETA, the Swiss watch manufacturer, which he adapts to his needs. Assembly, polishing and brushing are done in his small atelier, where he also makes the leather wrist straps with some assistance from a craftsman.

He employs a part-time assistant for clerical work, and his sister and brother help as needed. (Mr. Noy is married with two children, so days off are essential from time to time.)

His brother will accompany Mr. Noy to Baselworld, where he will unveil two new timepieces, one of them a skull watch, called Open Mind. The design shows a head in profile, complete with a spinal column, and the exposed movement is housed inside the brain.

“The idea is to expose the head and show you that there’s something going on inside,” he said with a laugh.

Mr. Noy’s watches are mostly priced from $1,890 to $5,800, which is bargain basement compared with those of many of his competitors and certainly many of the ones showing at Basel. The pricing goes back to his devotion to the craft — and his roots — more than lofty business ambitions.

“I don’t want to be greedy. It’s better to give a fair price. I don’t want to do mass production,” he said. “It’s my conversation with the audience.”

Among Mr. Noy’s most popular and successful timepieces is the Part Time, which Esquire magazine named one of the 10 best luxury watches for 2015. The watch’s dial is divided vertically, with daytime indicated in light blue on one side and nighttime as dark blue on the other. Its moon and sun images move and change, according to the time of day.

Other successes include the X-Ray, in which the dial image mimics the movement underneath — a blueprint of the watch, he said — and Identity, in which the Star of David appears across the dial with Hebrew letters for the hour markers.

“My philosophy about making watches is different than the traditional philosophy, which is to make a good watch that shows the time and maybe fits with your suit, and that’s it,” Mr. Noy said.

“I come from a different place. My education is art and design, and I’m trying to talk about time in my watches.”