Severin Wunderman, the owner of Corum, the Swiss luxury watch manufacturer, who was also an art collector and philanthropist, died Wednesday at his home in Nice, France, his son, Michael, said. He was 69.

Wunderman, who built Gucci Timepieces into a multimillion-dollar business, died after suffering a stroke, according to his son.

He owned homes in Southern California, Las Vegas and Europe.

Wunderman began his career in the 1960s as salesman for Alexi Barthelay, the European watchmaking firm. During a business trip to New York in the early 1970s, he called on Gucci, a company known for luxury accessories. The owner, Aldo Gucci, happened to answer the phone.

Wunderman established his business, Severin Montres, with a sales office in Irvine, Calif., and remained the single manufacturer and distributor of Gucci watches for more than 25 years.

He had worked his way back from a near-devastating childhood. Wunderman was born in Brussels, Belgium, on Nov. 19, 1938, the son of a Jewish glove manufacturer.

When the Nazis invaded the country during World War II, his parents paid a local Catholic priest to hide him and his two siblings in the Belgian countryside. He sold his Gucci watch business in the late 1990s and bought the Switzerland-based Corum company in 2000.