It takes courage to abandon a career in finance and start out in high-end watchmaking. Emmanuelle and Rodolfo Festa Bianchet did precisely that: after selling Rodolfo’s company, they decided to design a limited-edition sporty, lightweight tourbillon watch in a tonneau case. The development process took four years, starting in 2017. While they knew exactly the…
Without doubt, my most intense experience at Geneva Watch Days 2021 was with Ferdinand Berthoud. “Go ahead, try it”, said my host Jonathan as I sat drooling over the magnificent Chronomètre FB 2RE, which won the Chronometry prize at last year’s GPHG awards. I hesitated, in consideration of the fact that the timepiece costs much…
The watch named “Esmeralda Tourbillon à Secret” is a one-off tribute by Girard-Perregaux to a watch built by Constant Girard-Perregaux, the brand’s founder. It is sumptuously decorated throughout, and has a tourbillon movement based on Constant’s innovative design in which the bridges were placed in view as decorative elements. It is “Secret” in that the…
The U50 Diver Tourbillon by Angelus is a large and colourful watch that combines the fascination of a skeletonized dial and movement with the theatricality of a tourbillon and the practicality of a diver’s watch. Generally a diving watch is a tool watch and so very often doesn’t have a display caseback. The Angelus U50…
The TAG Heuer Carrera Heuer-02T introduced in 2016 was exceptional as the cheapest Swiss-made tourbillon chronograph watch ever made at just under 15,000 Swiss francs. It was part of Jean-Claude Biver’s new concept for the brand, concentrating on “entry-level” watches priced between €1,500 and €5,000. This year, 2018, TAG Heuer presents the Tête de Vipère…
Audemars Piguet have done something absolutely incredible with the Royal Oak Offshore Tourbillon Chronograph. You look at it, and at first sight, you don’t really understand what’s going on. You seem to be looking into a well, a deep opening, with the movement apparently suspended from the openworked wedge-like brackets that dominate the front of…
Roger Dubuis has launched a partnership deal with Pirelli, the tyre company that sponsors Milan football club F.C. Internazionale, with its black and blue livery (click here to read about the Excalibur Spider Pirelli). The Roger Dubuis Excalibur Spider Carbon seems to have been designed to keep the other Milanese team – A.C. Milan –…
ADN by Manufacture Royale is a tourbillon watch with a contemporary look and an interesting display. The name is the French version of DNA. The principal display at the top of the dial shows local time, by means of a disc with a window that jumps from one hour to the next – the hour…
After similar one-off pieces dedicated to the Wat Arun temple in Bangkok, and the Grand Prix de Monaco (both 2016), Ateliers deMonaco have presented the Tourbillon Casino de Monte-Carlo. A single piece depicting the Montecarlo casino on the dial, powered by the brand’s tourbillon movement XP1. I had imagined that this sort of watch was…
Piaget have introduced a tourbillon in its Altiplano collection for the first time. The Altiplano Tourbillon High Jewellery G0A42204 is part of the 60th anniversary celebrations for Altiplano, launched in 1957. Altiplano’s ultra-thin case and minimalist dial brought it immediate success and determined its staying-power in the world of watches. Case and dial The watch…
The Récital 20 Astérium by Bovet 1822 is a watch that keeps track of astronomical time. Instead of using the usual perpetual calendar function, in which the watch takes the leap year cycle into account, and so adding an extra day every four years, the Astérium follows the true course of time, determined by the…
The surprising thing about a skeletonized watch, such as the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Tourbillon Extra-Thin Openworked, is how little space the movement actually takes up. In this piece, the tourbillon takes up the bottom quarter of the case, the mainspring is at the top, and the wheels of the movement are all concentrated on…
Fawaz Gruosi of de Grisogono launched the New Retro collection two years ago. These rectangular, 1950s style watches were inspired by the shape of his cigar case, and feature a watchcase consisting of two curving sapphire crystals united by a gold caseband. New Retro had a degree of resemblance to another period design, the East…
“It is not through doing what everyone else does that you become someone,” says Anura Rafael. He grew up in Switzerland’s watchmaking heartland, and for over 15 years he has worked for major watch brands. Now he has set up his own enterprise, Anura Rafael, and has launched his first product, Write Time. This is…
The unusual thing about this watch is the fact that you can now see the tourbillon from the dial. Up until now, watches by Laurent Ferrier have had something of the 19th century discretion and functional logic that can be seen in brands like A. Lange & Söhne. In other words, the tourbillon is a…
Several brands do these super-modern skeletonized tourbillons, in which the architecture is reduced to the minimum. Roger Dubuis creates star-shaped bridges, Blancpain does sci-fi spiky, Cartier does its amazing Astrotourbillon. The Ulysse Nardin Executive Skeleton Tourbillon has a rectangular geometry for the bridge visible from the front, creating a watch of incredible simplicity, dominated by…
This is an edition limited to one single watch. It combines a tourbillon movement probably made by Concepto for Romain Jerome, and a hand-painted dial featuring the Pokémon characters. Romain Jerome has an ongoing cooperation with The Pokémon Company International, giving this watch an exclusive rarity value. They say that it will be assigned on…
A graffiti artist goes to the metro station, chooses an expanse of wall in a stairwell, and creates an enormous colourful composition. Then a few days or weeks later, along come the municipal painters who repaint the wall. All that is left of the graffiti artist’s work is the stair handrail, still decorated with gaudy…
At first sight, it’s a tourbillon watch with a big date, but there is more to the Bovet 1822 Virtuoso VIII than meets the eye. One thing is difficult to see in the official photos: the case is slightly angled, wedge-form, only 4.5° but nonetheless it creates a sort of theatrical stage effect. In the…
Great name, and a perfect description of this product. The Write Time by Anura Rafael is a tourbillon watch housed in a conical sapphire crystal case, that can be converted into a fountain pen. It recalls the days when watchmakers strived to create curious objects for the enjoyment of their wealthy patrons, people like Pierre…