Feature: 5 watches I think about every day
You know there’s that one watch you just can’t get out of your head? Yeah, well seeing as many watches as I do, I’ve got five. But they’re not all for the reasons you might expect. Especially the last one.
Christopher Ward Bel Canto
You know when something happens that completely turns your world and everything in it upside down? Like in Star Trek the next generation where Tasha Yar gets killed and all of a sudden the sacred rule that characters with a surname are safe is broken? Yeah, well the Christopher Ward Bel Canto is like that, but less evil.
There we all were minding our business thinking that £3,000 or so was enough to buy a Kickstarter Sellita chronograph or a Tudor diver, and we all thought that was pretty cool. Never in our wildest dreams did we think we’d get to buy something more MB&F than microbrand.
With its 41mm Grade 5 titanium case at just 13mm tall, there was no unfortunate catch like weighing as much as a house or being the size of a house. It’s stylish, elegant, well-made—oh, and they somehow found the budget to squeeze in a chiming complication, too.
The on-off button bottom right switches the indicator from chiming to silent via the little “beak” as they call it. When the volume’s turned up, the watch gives a charming little ding every hour, on the hour. It’s no minute repeater, but it’s a grand sight better than I ever expected for the price.
Thanks to some clever rapid prototyping techniques and efficient supply chain shenanigans, the Bel Canto doesn’t cost fifty or even five thousand pounds. It’s ballpark priced around the same as a Tudor Black Bay 58, which still, after several months since it launched, boggles my mind. But really what makes me think about it most is the way it looks. I have an unholy desire for an MB&F LM101, but being that it’s so expensive, it doesn’t play on my mind too much. This, however—this gives you 80% of the experience for about a twentieth of the cost. And I just can’t get over that.
Grand Seiko SBGW231
How would I describe my experience with the Grand Seiko Kodo? Was I blown away? Staggered, perhaps? Maybe, but those words seem too superficial to really explain it. It was a moment of calm realisation that something different had just happened, that things would never quite be the same again.
Is that the Grand Seiko that I think about daily? No, funnily enough, it’s not. There’s a little hand-wound fella at just 37.3mm that occupies my mind far, far more. It’s the SBGW231, and whilst on the surface it looks quite unremarkable, it has an appeal that I can’t really explain.
I’ll have a go, though, otherwise this whole exercise is pretty fruitless. As much as I love crazy watches like the LM101 and Bel Canto, I’m still drawn to the simplest and best executed examples of traditional watchmaking, but unfortunately many of those are too rich for my blood. The Patek Philippe Calatrava, for example, or the A. Lange & Söhne Saxonia Thin. Never mind the Philippe Dufour Simplicity.
This, however, is £4,150, and that’s an amount that I can conceivably entertain. Not without thinking, not by a long way, but it’s not a write-off either. And as we all know, Grand Seiko has the might of all Seiko behind it to produce a watch that far exceeds its price point in quality.
So we expect a simple but beautiful dial, set with jewel-like hands and markers. We expect a highly polished mirror finish on the case. What we don’t quite expect and is perhaps the thing I think about the most, is the hand-wound calibre 9S64.
In a beauty contest, it won’t rival the likes of its more expensive competitors, but it does enough to make it wholly desirable. It has a three-quarter plate design, striped of course, and a deeply dished and polished ratchet wheel. But my favourite detail is the click, usually just a bent piece of a wire, that’s here fashioned from a piece of ruby. It’s a delightful little thing, and thankfully not a pain to own either, thanks to three days of power reserve.
A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Tourbillon Handwerkskunst 730.048
I know I said there are expensive watches that I don’t think about because they’re expensive, and I know the A. Lange & Söhne 1815 Tourbillon Handwerkskunst is as expensive as it is unpronounceable, but you’ll have to forgive me this once for thinking about a watch that costs as much as a Lamborghini.
What’s so alluring about it that means I can’t get it out of my mind? You might think it’s the incredible calibre L102.1, also featured in the non-Handwerkskunst model. It packs a tourbillon so big and so fine you could be forgiven for thinking it was a miniature musical instrument.
With the angled, polished bridge—which takes a whole day just to polish by hand—and the swooping cage, the tourbillon is even more satisfying to watch than a whole flight of things being squashed in a hydraulic press. If more people owned these, TikTok would be brimming with them.
It’s not that incredible finishing either that I think about most, although I do think about it. A. Lange & Söhne, unlike others, offers the same level of finishing on all of its watches, regardless of price, so you don’t have to stretch all the way to this to enjoy the razor-sharp 4k clarity a Lange has to offer.
What I think about on a 24-hour rinse and repeat cycle is the dial. Not only is the contrast between the rose gold markers and the rhodium plating like hot butter on fresh toast, but the depth of this thing is truly remarkable—as well as how the watchmakers got there.
When this dial started life, it was a rose gold plate about is thick as the markers. Everything else in between was carved out by hand, very slowly and very carefully. It’s a lino print, but in gold. Even the brand logo and manufacture location are carved out. The whole thing is then plated and a textured finish applied to the markers which reveals the rose gold once more. I think about it a lot because not only is it beautiful, but I can only begin to imagine how tedious it is to make!
Credor Eichi II
Okay, so I lied. You’ll have to forgive me twice because this next watch is one that’s going to set its buyer back bang-on £50,000. It’s a watch that’s even harder to explain than the Grand Seiko from earlier, because not only is it simple, not only is it a quartz—it also costs over ten times the price.
A watch couldn’t look more simple. And with the quartz movement, if someone were to compare it to a Daniel Wellington, there are some points I’d have to concede on. It would be worse than admitting to watching and liking a TV show recommendation from a friend rather than pretending you discovered it yourself, but it would be inevitable.
So why do I think about this 39mm, platinum watch? It’s not so much the what as the how. Let me give you an example. At a glance, and even a stare, those markers look printed on. And why wouldn’t they be? It’s the simplest and best way to achieve such a look. You’ll get numbers crispier than deep fried cheese all day long.
Credor chose not to print onto the porcelain dial, but to paint. With a brush. By hand. Sounds needlessly complicated and laborious, and it is, but that’s the point. It’s a discipline. An art to be mastered. It’s not about the what, but the how.
The polished steel hands are heat blued. Usually this is done in batches to create uniformity, because a nanosecond too much or too little will yield a different hue. Not in the Credor. Each hand is blued individually, to demonstrate the skill of the artisan bluing each one. Not the what, the how.
And the movement, the calibre 7R14. It’s Spring Drive, so you wind it, but it uses mechanically generated electricity to power a quartz regulator. The result is a perfectly smooth second-hand sweep, which is suitably serene for such an idyllic watch.
Its finishing treatment is no less fastidious than the rest of the watch, with every single mirrored surface polished by hand with a piece of wood and some polishing paste. No Dremels here! The collective result is a watch that could forgivably be dismissed as bland, boring, dull even—but is actually one of the most impressive in the world.
Audemars Piguet Code 11.59 15210BC.OO.A002CR.01
The last watch that plays on my mind is one I don’t think I would like to own. I think about it because it confuses me. It’s not an ugly watch, or a badly made watch. It’s just confusing. I’m talking about the Audemars Piguet Code 11.59, what was intended to be the spiritual successor to the crazy popular Royal Oak.
There are three things that confuse me about it. First is the name. Code 11.59. It feels so devoid of passion and artistry, especially when compared to the name “Royal Oak”. Royal Oak evokes images of great sailing ships, glorious but deadly battles, plunder and booty and just generally a frolicking good time at sea.
Code 11.59? It sounds like the name students would give to an all-nighter before the big exam. It might as well be called the, “Left to the Last Minute,” or the “It’ll Be Fine.” Audemars Piguet says the name symbolises the last minute before a challenging new day, to be on the brink of tomorrow. And this came out before ChatGPT.
Then there’s the looks. It’s not ugly. Nowhere near. I can’t say it’s not handsome either. It’s just … something doesn’t quite click. It feels like the combination of lots of elements that don’t really gel because, well, that’s what it is. The curving crystal that creates a layered illusion. The hollowed, sculptural lugs. The eight-sided case, a nod to the Royal Oak’s bezel. By themselves, all pretty cool; together, designed by committee.
There have been a few attempts to tweak the design and I do think it’s much improved, but then that’s like improving cream paint by making it a bit more beige. Like I said, not a bad watch at all. Very well finished, beautiful materials—and that brings me on to the third thing that confuses me about it: the manufacturer that brought us the Royal Oak thought the Code 11.59 could come anywhere near close to competing.
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