“Yeah man…we really kicked ass on that one.” Octavio Garcia, chief of design at respected watchmaker Audemars Piguet (le maitre de l’horlogerie depuis 1875) is expressing his pleasure at the success of a special limited edition prestige sportswatch.

If one were to select an actor to star in the biopic of Octavio Garcia, the 39-year-old design boss, Keanu Reeves would top the list. At times the argot used by Mr Garcia is perilously close to that of the surfer, but then, just when one expects him to say something like “radical dude”, he will express himself in fluent French on the subject of how much he enjoys working with the classic and complicated pieces of Audemars Piguet, such as the “repetition minutes” or the “Equation du Temps”.

Octavio Garcia is a long way from home. Born on the south side of Chicago, the son of a welder and one of five children, he now goes to work each day in the calm, clean and clinical surroundings of Audemars Piguet’s manufacture in Le Brassus, Switzerland. While he was growing up in the “hood”, life may have had what one could describe as its ups and downs; but life in the Vallée de Joux follows a more even rhythm. The most exciting thing to happen in Le Brassus was the tornado of 1891, and now over 100 years later Garcia is causing a little whirlwind of his own by bringing a new sense of aesthetics to one of the most respected of watch brands.

However, had he not met a Swiss girl, fallen in love and moved to the mountainous little country in the middle of Europe, 21st century haute horlogerie would have been denied the talents of a most interesting watch designer. That is not to say that he did not experience a few cultural problems when he arrived. “I used to be like gangsta-style. Being from Chicago, from the ’hood, meant that I had a specific dress code,” he says.

When he emigrated he was taking architecture classes. On arrival in Switzerland he looked for somewhere to continue his education. “I discovered the Art Center College of Design, the main school is in Pasadena and they opened a branch near Montreux. I graduated from there in 1996 with a BSc in industrial design. The Art Center offers a generalist programme that gives you the basis to create just about anything from a car to a toaster. This was one of the big advantages,” he says, adding a freshly mixed metaphor: “It gave you the tools to play any kind of music you want.”

Continuing with his musical metaphor, it would be fair to say that the freshly graduated Mr Garcia knew he wanted to make music, but was unsure which instrument to play. Together with a couple of friends he tried to create a business that blended web and furniture design, before finding a job at Omega in 1999. “Omega is a huge, well-oiled machine, and it was a great place to learn how to understand watches; that is where I was really exposed to the whole horological thing. Omega has such a rich history and working there gave me the opportunity to meet some interesting people like Jean Claude Biver [the maverick genius behind the rebirth of Hublot was then at Omega] and Nicolas Hayek Sr [the CEO of Swatch Group]. Being exposed to these kind of figures helped shaped my understanding of watches. In terms of pure design, it was then that I realised that watches were emotional products.”

It was a newspaper advertisement that took him to Audemars Piguet in 2003 and since his arrival he has achieved two things. The first was to bring a sense of contemporaneity to the brand, and it is in the pieces of the Millenary collection that he feels most of his personal vision can be seen. “The Millenary was designed in the early 90s,” taking its inspiration from a rare 1960s model, and when I saw it I said, ‘Wow cool’. I really wanted it to have a specific personality, a mixture of classic and contemporary.”

It is in the course of his work on the Millenary range that he has been liaising closely with Giulio Papi, of AP’s experimental R&D company Renaud Papi. “Working on the fifth watch in the cabinet collection series was one of the first big projects that we did together,” he says. The cabinet tradition d’excellence series of watches comprises a small number of sophisticated timepieces that together build into a sort of conceptual laboratory.

Mr Garcia’s second significant achievement at Audemars Piguet – as well as the dazzling showstoppers that comprise the tradition d’excellence – has been refining and, dare one say it, improvement of the brand’s iconic Royal Oak collection. The octagonal steel sportswatch is now 35 years old and is rightly hailed as a classic. It is arguably the most important luxury wristwatch of the latter half of the 20th century. To dare to alter it is a daunting task, but when a new calibre was created to power this horological icon, a redesign was necessary to enable the movement to be fitted, but it had to be a redesign that nobody would notice. Garcia applied himself to the task with a forensic meticulousness. “You can’t cheat with a Royal Oak, so when we redid it for the 15300 Calibre 3120 it was important to respect each component, from the bracelet to the thickness of the caseback. The idea was to take some of the elements that were incoherent and clean them up. The hands did not feel that they were part of the watch and now the hands are faceted in the same way as the case is. It is little details that make the difference and they had been overlooked in the past.”

When considering his own past, an irony becomes apparent: Garcia may well have made the cultural and geographical shift from the “hood” to the Vallée, nevertheless it is intriguing to note that Audemars Piguet’s Royal Oak Offshore is probably the hottest watch with other boyz from the hood done good. For leaders in the fields of rap and R&B, an AP Royal Oak Offshore is de rigueur, or “boo ya”, as they probably don’t say in the Vallée de Joux.