I just adore, or rather I mean love, when independents take a step from impressing the world, flashing technical innovation and bold design cues, to demonstrate their ability through restrained or classic sensiblities. Dufour has the Simplicity. Roger Smith the Series I. Rexhep the Chronometre Contemporain. De Bethune, well this...

Not all Day Dates come in Oyster cases. Shortly after the 5402 graced the world with its presence, AP experimented with a few variations on the theme. Out of this early/mid 80s era came many of the iconic complicated Royal Oak offerings we revere today. However, the very first complicated...

Saab: one of many names, or brands, that you just don’t expect to tangent anywhere near watchmaking. TAG partnering with Porsche makes sense, directionally and historically. Omega and Bond; it’s not what Fleming wrote but no one will argue there isn’t synergy there. But Saab? The people who made aspirational...

A historically significant flagship, the Aviator’s Compact Chronograph (or Aero-Compax for short, Compax being UG’s parlance for complication) sits right alongside the Polerouter, Clapton, Big Eye, or Nina as core to the brand’s identity. This mid-1960s second major iteration of the famed chronograph shifted focus from timing dual events to...

Walking around any major city with a truly exceptional watch on wrist is a bit like walking down the street holding a Van Gogh above your head. Without wishing to be ostentatious, in many respects you are doing someone a very slight favor by adding a degree of culture to...

Birch is the kind of adjective you expect to find next to ‘Eames Chair’, not ‘Day-Date’. We all know Rolex has used the Day-Date to host hundreds of exotic dial materials, many in extremely low volumes. Readers here will know of my affection for ligneous Presidents, but I haven’t elaborated...

Tantalum is not often seen in watchmaking. It’s difficult to work with, extremely so, but highly corrosion and scratch resistant with a gunmetal-blue tone that is just gorgeous. FP Journe launched the Chronomètre Bleu in 2009 and made elaborate fanfare about how innovative it was to be executed in tantalum....

Discretion is something of a lost art to much of modern watchmaking. In many ways, a relatively thin, time-only minute repeater could be said to be the antithesis of an orange RM or rainbow Daytona. There’s nothing wrong with outward flamboyance, but it’s a breath of fresh air to see...

I’ve heard it said that the movement is the heart of a watch, the case its body, and the dial its soul. This analogy is tenuous at best, a bit like when you hear food critics start talking about the emotion contained within an entrée. That’s just a dinner and...

It is not difficult to understand the timeless appeal of a well-executed dress watch. When complication is removed, effort in finishing is allowed to be a watch’s main focus. Total simplicity, finished to an absurd standard. I believe this appeal is, in large part, responsible for the recent astronomic rise...

Provenance is funny thing. What is it exactly? This 7169/0 has only ever had one owner who kept all the ephemera and serviced it regularly. But it is still ‘just’ a well-preserved Monte Carlo. I know multiple collectors who are only interested in one-owner watches. This intrigues me. It’s a...

With every day that passes, the horological marketplace which consumes my attention becomes a more diverse and interesting place. It would be callous of me not to discuss this development. A Collected Man, the long established leader in independent retail, recently changed the game by announcing ‘exceptional’ auctions. These single...

I would be willing to bet a great bottle of Glenrothes that, if you asked industry luminaries for their top five most beautiful Patek Philippe references of all time, the 3417 Amagnetic would feature in the majority. This is an elegant Calatrava belying the soul of a steel tool watch....

Opulence is often said to be distasteful by definition, but a gold nipple dial? C’mon, that’s an exemption many amongst us and I will gladly make. While the GMT-Master was made for the jet set, Rolex recognized early on that its well-heeled, travel-hungry clientelle could afford a little extra aureate....

Why spend hundreds of hours whittling away at each individual component a perpetual calendar movement until just the necessary structures are left? Openworking, or skeletonization, yields no performance benefit. You even wind up with less gold. But the resulting calibre is so breathtaking to look at that an openwork 25668...

Romain Gauthier make some of the most intimidating watches of any modern independent. This is due to their immense finishing, masculine proportion, precise manufacturing, and, perhaps most of all, industrial aesthetic. There’s also the fact that RG produce just a few dozen watches per year, far fewer than almost everyone...

Very little can truly be described as timeless. A Patek Calatrava deserves that laudable adjective like little else. The 2508, produced between 1951 and 1960, is a high point of the Calatrava lineage for many. It debuted a larger 35mm case manufactured by Taubert & Fils (later known as Borgel)...

AP’s 5548 is lore: conceived in secret by a crack team of watchmakers (veteran watchmaker Michel Rochat, founder of the technical department Jean-Daniel Golay, and founder of the after-sales service department Wilfred Berney) to return complicated mechanical watchmaking to its rightful throne in the wake of the quartz crisis. But...