Watchmaking is already an incredibly delicate craft, but at these dimensions it requires next-level engineering and design. Reducing a timepiece to such Lilliputian scale is no small feat. Audemars Piguet flexed some serious muscle to get this new ultra-thin Royal Oak’s 6.3 mm waistline: Its 5133 movement is just 2.89 mm thick, nearly as slim as a strand of spaghetti, making this watch the thinnest automatic perpetual calendar on the market. Putting watches on a diet-making them thinner, lighter and sleeker-has become as trendy as an Equinox membership, except it involves a hell of a lot more work. Image Credit: Courtesy of Audemars Piguet
Design: Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Self-Winding Perpetual Ultra-Thin.Topping it off is a salmon dial with “The Only One” spelled out, to drive home the owner’s ultimate horological bragging rights. Still, its anonymous buyer has one serious piece of horology in hand, a two-faced timepiece with 1,366 movement components, 214 case components, a perpetual calendar and grande sonnerie. That may sound wildly hedonistic for a collectible timepiece, but all that cash went to a great cause as part of Christie’s biannual Only Watch auction of one-of-a-kind timepieces from the world’s best watchmakers: Every cent was donated to research for Duchenne muscular dystrophy. For a little perspective, the same money could buy you 320 new Porsche 911s or three Embraer Phenom 300E business jets. 6300A-010 wristwatch made headlines last November when the piece sold for over $31 million, eclipsing the company’s record sale of $24 million for its Henry Graves Supercom- plication in 2014 and making it the most expensive watch in the world. Patek Philippe’s one-off stainless-steel Grandmaster Chime Ref. Auction Star: Patek Philippe Only Watch.Journe, and I’m still begging for his watches.” I had to wait two years to get my hands on an F.
As one collector recently told Robb Report, “I have 14 Patek Philippes. Journe fanatics, the watchmaker later announced a limited-production version featuring a gold dial with a whitened-silver guilloche Clous de Paris in a steel case-and made available only to those already in the watchmaker’s lofty orbit. The Astronomic Souveraine debuted as a prototype at Christie’s Only Watch charity auction last November with a tantalum case, a blue dial and an orange alligator strap, hammering for $1.8 million- second only to Patek Philippe’s record-setting Grandmaster Chime Ref. And all of that technical prowess is squeezed into 44 x 13.8 mm.
High horology watch full#
An equation of time indicator-the time displayed by the position of the sun, as on a sundial, and real time, as displayed on the wrist-and a full annual calendar are encircled by signs of the zodiac and a one-minute tourbillon with a remontoir d’égalité. The dial comes jam-packed: a sunrise/sunset indicator a 42-hour power-reserve marker a moon phase an hours subdial for two time zones a 24-hour sub-dial for sidereal time (based on the rotation of the Earth in relation to the stars) with a seconds counter underneath and minutes on a peripheral track.Įqual attention was paid to the back, which presents a clear view of its 18-karat rose-gold movement. Journe’s knockout astronomical watch is a horological head-spin: 18 complications and 758 components.
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