Feature: This Greubel Forsey Watch Is The Craziest GMT You’ve Ever Seen

Seeing a Greubel Forsey watch for the very first time can be an intimidating and slightly bewildering experience, a bit like an ancient explorer stumbling across a previously unencountered large animal in the wild—an elephant, say.

Can I eat it? Will it eat me ? Why does it have a penis on its face?

To a complete watch newbie, a Greubel Forsey watch might well elicit a similar response.

With their asymmetrical 3D dials, bulging cases and multiple tourbillons—up to four in a single watch—it is arguably the most esoteric of the super-high-end brands and their incredible watches have previously been described as “horological thought experiments.”

Yet despite this GMT model boasting all the hallmarks of a Greubel Forsey watch—they were never going to make a standard Rolex-style GMT with a 24-hour bezel—it doesn’t require the technical brain of Abraham-Louis Breguet and the patience of a saint to use.

This, folks, is what happens when an eccentric, ultra-haute horlogerie brand makes a GMT for its billionaire customers.

The Familiar Bits

Let’s take a deep breath and cast our eyes over the typically large and varied landscape of this Greubel Forsey dial, most of which is taken up by the largest sub-dial, which gives us the local-time hours and minutes in standard fashion. There’s also a smaller sub-dial for small seconds and, beneath it, a power reserve indicator, with the tourbillon fluttering away at 5 o’clock.

With its real-time rotating globe, the Greubel Forsey GMT is a show-stopper

On the left of the dial is the visual show-stopper, a rotating 3D globe (more of which later) and above it, your second time zone. No prizes for being able to work this one out. It’s a simple 12-hour sub-dial with just a single triangular pointer in red indicating the hour of another country or region. For the minutes you simply refer to the minute-hand of the main dial.

The Globe

As if you need any reminding that this is a world timer, the dial also features a ball bearing-sized planet Earth made from titanium that rotates in real-time. Previously, Greubel Forsey has made watches that contain micro-sculptures that are purely aesthetic, so you’d be forgiven for assuming they’ve included this for the novelty aspect.

The watch allows you to track two time zones simultaneously and easily

But, no, this is a functional device that shows you—at a glance—which part of the world is experiencing night-time and which part day-time. The part of the Earth in daylight is shown by the white background half of the surrounding 24-hour ring (a bit like a two-tone GMT bezel). It’s a handy function for a frequent flyer traversing the globe, although the Earth is viewed from a rather unfamiliar perspective somewhere above the North Pole so it takes a few seconds to orient yourself and work out what continent is which.

The Reverse

Flip this watch over and through the exhibition caseback you’ll find a slightly more traditional world time disc featuring 24 time zones, from Astana to Auckland.

This disc rotates once per day, and even accounts for those pesky countries like the UK that put their clocks back for summer time, or DST (Daylight Saving Time). These places are shown in white, and you can read their correct local time by matching the location to the the inner, rather than the outer, 24-hour track. For the rest of the year, just use the outer track.

On the reverse is a rotating disc featuring 24 time zones around the world

All the functions are set using just the crown and a GMT pusher at 10 o’clock, which requires a bit of practice but becomes second-nature when you know how.

The Rest

Of course, this being a Greubel Forsey it would be criminal to leave out the other things that make this a half-a-million-dollar-plus watch, such as the all-platinum 43.5mm case and a mainplate made from German silver with rose gold PVD coating. Cases in other versions also come in rose gold and white gold.

The manual-wind Caliber GF05 movement is given added accuracy by the inclined 24-second tourbillon and considering all that’s going in the watch, the power reserve is a respectable 72 hours.

There’s also Greubel Forsey’s world-class hand-finishing, with mirror polishing, grained plates and a ‘sun’ pattern engraving on a gold wheel—also seen through the exhibition caseback—which drives the globe. For all its technical innovation, the brand is known for its championing of traditional watch techniques and is committed to preserving them for future generations of watchmakers with its La Garde Temps Naissance d’une Montre project.

Lastly, there is, of course, the wonderful satisfaction of knowing that you are one of just 198 people in the world to own one of these magnificent beasts, making sightings of them in the wild a rare and precious thing.

Even rarer, however, is the brand's GMT Quadruple Tourbillon Chapter 2 that was released in titanium in 2021, limited to 11 pieces and selling at retail for $820,000. We can't wait to see what sort of GMT Greubel Forsey comes up with next.