Breguet patented the tourbillon in 1801 and puts the patent date on the dial. A twenty-something Frenchman on the shore of Lake Annecy makes twelve tourbillons a year by hand, and charges less. For once the independent is not the expensive one.
Matched on
The tourbillon as a dress watch: the house that patented it in 1801, against a French independent hand-making the same complication today.
Breguet, Vallée de Joux
About USD 173,300 in rose gold, USD 190,300 in platinum
Breguet patented the tourbillon on 7 Messidor An 9, 26 June 1801, and has never stopped saying so: the date is written on the dial. The 5367 is the modern argument for the house, an extra-flat self-winding tourbillon under a grand feu enamel dial, with eighty hours in the barrel. You are buying the invention itself, from the name that owns the story outright, and paying a two-century provenance premium for it.
Rémy Cools, Annecy
About EUR 159,000
Cools set up his own workshop in his early twenties and had a commercial tourbillon out by 2020, which is not a normal sentence to be able to write. Twelve leave Annecy a year, every part hand-finished under his own roof. You are buying the complication made the slow way by the person whose name is on it, in the country where it was invented, and you are paying less than the house that invented it.
The verdict
This pairing runs the other way from the usual one. Normally the independent is the multiple: the hand-made piece costs many times the industrial one, and the question is how far up the curve you want to go. Here the young Frenchman making twelve a year undercuts the maison by roughly fourteen thousand dollars at the rose-gold price. So the money is not the question. What you are actually choosing between is two hundred and twenty-five years of provenance, written on the dial, or the fact that a living person made the whole thing and you can go and meet him. Both are legitimate answers. Only one of them is still getting cheaper relative to the other.
The TGC view
The independent index exists for exactly this comparison. A client who wants a tourbillon usually starts at the maison and assumes the alternative is a compromise or a saving. It is neither: at this level it is a different kind of ownership, at a similar price. We make the introduction, and the workshop visit is the part worth arranging.
An IWC pilot's watch against a Bavarian house that makes its own steel and its own movements. The usual story is that the independent charges a premium. Here it does not, and the establishment name is the one trading under list.
Read the review →Two pure round dress watches, and a shared secret: the independent was made by a man who spent thirty-seven years inside one of the great Geneva houses before leaving to sign his own name. The house, or the hand that used to work there?
Read the review →Two watches judged on the same virtue, finishing, at twenty times the price. One is a Japanese manufacture selling a mirror-polished case for the price of a holiday. The other is a Finnish master hand-making fifty a year. How far up the curve does your eye want to go?
Read the review →