Auffret Paris Tourbillon à Paris Subscription

The Tourbillon à Paris is Théo Auffret’s first watch: a hand-wound regulator tourbillon in a 38.5mm case, offered in platinum, gold, silver, titanium or steel. Hours sit off-centre, minutes central, and the open dial puts the barrel at 12 and a 14mm tourbillon at lower left under broad finger bridges. The 2019 souscription targeted about five a year and 20 in all; it reportedly closed at 15 in 2023. Its unfinished prototype made Auffret one of three winners of the F.P. Journe Young Talent Competition in January 2018, alongside Rémy Cools and Charles Routhier.

Photography for this Find comes courtesy of Auffret Paris (1) and A Collected Man (2 & 3). 

Born in 1995 west of Paris, Auffret restored clocks at Dupont in Pontoise, apprenticed from 2012 with Corpechot in Paris while studying through the LEF in Morteau, then joined Jean-Baptiste Viot, the ex-Breguet watchmaker. Viot taught him traditional construction, and Auffret helped finish Viot’s last three chronometers; after hours, on Viot’s machines, he drew the tourbillon on paper and built it almost entirely by hand, silver case included. A year at Luca Soprana’s Ateliers 7h38 in Switzerland rounded out his training.

With Viot’s help he opened a workshop in December 2018, then a two-floor atelier in Villennes-sur-Seine; by autumn 2025, the fourth floor of 10 Place des Victoires. The prototype borrowed a Peseux 260 barrel, centre wheel and pinions plus a vintage LeCoultre escapement. Production watches use a Precision Engineering escapement and cases CNC-machined by an unnamed Swiss specialist. Complex movement parts are CNC-roughed, then hand-finished; design, hands, regulation and assembly stay in-house.

The layout follows 18th-century precision timekeepers, built on a flat mainplate for simple, robust machining. The prototype’s marine-chronometer-style cylindrical poising weights were to give way to a flat weight. Plates and bridges are German silver, two of them hardened steel, with charcoal-grained surfaces, hand-filed bevels polished with wood and diamantine, and rounded, tapering cage arms. The first example to reach auction sells at Phillips Hong Kong on 21–22 November. We'll likely be watching fireworks.