The original Rolls-Royce Silver Dawn saw the light of day in 1952. This ultra-famous name in the Rolls-Royce repertoire has been used only 28 times since then. Fast forward to September 8, 2015, when Rolls-Royce did something unprecedented: it streamed the press conference of its latest creation on the worldwide web. The brand-new Rolls-Royce Dawn is officially a product of the digital age!
At Grieb & Benzinger, blue is something of a corporate color when it comes to decorating the unique and exceedingly rare watches that the boutique brand based in a historic castle near Stuttgart produces. Hermann Grieb once told me how he and Jochen Benzinger came upon the idea for it. “The idea for this color came to us after an exhausting day of work in a local vineyard while enjoying a cool drink,” Grieb explained in his mischievous deadpan heavily inflected with local dialect. “The setting sun and the colors it created in the northern Black Forest sky simply inspired us.” The new Blue Chip collection prominently features this luxurious blue color.
The Roger Dubuis Hommage collection has produced exceptional pieces, but one has stood out to me as a masterpiece worthy of a deeper look because of its sheer awesomazingness. That piece is the Hommage Minute Repeater Tourbillon Automatic. Because with the Hommage Minute Repeater you can see virtually everything!
Döttling is a safe manufacturer. But these are not your run-of-the-mill safes, as the workshop specialized in the bespoke was founded in 1919 as a small locksmith shop by Markus Döttling’s great-grandfather, Ernst Döttling.
The products in Döttling’s Legend line start life as vintage safes discovered by the Döttling team. Beautiful refurbishing of the piece in old-world manner allows every aspect of it to be fitted out for its future owner.
The latest Legend is a safe with a fascinating history starting in nineteenth-century Italy with Victor Emmanuel II and his great love, Rosa Vercellana . . .
There is not much art that that packs as much into such an aesthetically pleasing parcel as Romain Gauthier’s Logical One Secret Kakau Höfke. This watch uses one of the world’s finest timepieces as a “canvas” for the artwork of two renowned artists: Kakau Höfke and Olivier Vaucher. These two work in very different fields and even on different continents: Höfke is a painter located in Rio de Janeiro and Vaucher is a stone artist at work in Switzerland. What all three have created is nothing short of a masterpiece.
There’s no doubt that the M is a Montblanc pen, due in part to its glossy black body and crowning snowcap. But the similarity ends where the transcendence begins, thanks to Australian designer Marc Newson’s signature biomorphic style. For the first time in Montblanc’s history, a fountain pen’s gold nib is plated in two tones using rhodium and ruthenium. But that’s not all.
The Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève (GPHG) has just published the list of 2015’s pre-selected watches in the run-up to the big red carpet event in Geneva on October 29. The pre-selected watches will go on a world tour that includes stops in Hong Kong, Seoul, Dubai, Geneva, and London in October and November. But enough preamble, let’s have a look at the watches that are now in serious contention to take home big prizes this year.
Richard Mille opened his new boutique in Paris. The chic new location just off the Champs-Elysées, whose vicinity is also home to Christie’s and several art galleries in addition to luxurious high fashion boutiques, showcases the now quite substantial collection well. This gorgeous boutique is home to amazing timepieces, while downstairs VIP guests can be treated to private showings while relaxing with a cigar and a glass of fine French champagne.
I recently had the chance to spend two nights at the Hôtel de Vendôme, which is situated as the gateway to Paris’ swankiest shopping square: Place Vendôme. I stayed there as a guest of Chopard on the way to Le Mans, and this is when I learned a very interesting fact: the beautifully appointed hotel housed within an eighteenth-century mansion now belongs to the Swiss brand.
A very significant percentage of the (hand) work − and therefore cost − of a high-end watch goes into the finishing of components.
Today, fine finishing is no longer essential from a practical point of view as watches are assembled in dust- and moisture-free environments, and waterproofing generally does a good job at keeping moisture and dust out of the timepiece during daily use.
But fine finishing isn’t just about mechanical practicality: contrasting finishes visually break up large surfaces, and reflections off mirror-polished steel catches the eye. Finishes can be a signature of sorts: think of Breguet’s guilloche dials or Greubel Forsey’s English-style frosted plates.
Few brands take hand finishing as seriously as Greubel Forsey, where each and every component is individually decorated. Just finishing one bridge can require two days of work. And that’s just one of hundreds of components in the brand’s usually quite complicated movements.
And then the watchmaker has to assemble all of these beautifully decorated parts, without a single scratch.
In this video by The Watches TV, Stephen Forsey explains why finishing is so important to Greubel Forsey and takes a look at the whole process.