Coming To Our Retrospective Exhibition In Dubai: Three New Masterpieces From De Bethune

In the years since De Bethune was founded in 2002, the company has produced watches across a range of complications, and in a variety of designs and design languages, that almost stands alone in fine watchmaking. Most watch brands, luxury or otherwise, tend to find a fairly particular design language and stick with it — making watches that are instantly recognizable is a major part of building a watch brand’s identity as a whole.

De Bethune, however, has chosen to follow a different and more difficult path. The company has a phenomenal range of watches, with just about every major complication in the fine watchmaking repertoire, but the design language is enormously varied. However, this doesn’t stop any De Bethune watch from being visually identifiable as a De Bethune watch — they’re so distinctive and stand so much apart from watchmaking  business-as-usual, that they really define their own universe of style, design, and craftsmanship.

The Retrospective Exhibition: Two Decades Of De Bethune And F. P. Journe, will be in Dubai February 15-17, and in addition to dozens of rare, beautiful, and horologically important vintage watches, we’ll be bringing with us three new pieces from De Bethune’s current collection. It’s a rare opportunity to see De Bethune watches in person and, as they say, “in the metal” as the company’s annual production of watches is very low, with only a few thousand timepieces made over De Bethune’s entire history since 2002. There’s a reason for the exclusivity — De Bethune is one of the few places where traditional hand-finishing and other traditional watchmaking techniques are still practiced, in contrast to the industrial methods, and industrial scale production, which characterizes much of modern watchmaking even in the luxury segment.

The De Bethune Starry Varius GMT Titanium

The Starry Varius GMT Titanium is De Bethune’s very poetic and very individualistic take on what is, most of the time, a very pragmatic complication, and one that’s typically executed in a rather utilitarian fashion. The GMT complication’s name derives from the history of second time zone watches which, like the Rolex GMT Master, were originally designed to track the time in a second time zone, and also to indicate Greenwich Mean Time (today called UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated) which is the time standard across multiple time zones used in aviation (in military parlance, “Zulu” time).

The Starry Varius GMT Titanium is a very different take on the complication. Unlike the very practical looking cockpit instruments produced by many brands, the Starry Varius GMT is a piece of fine watchmaking deploying all the technical innovation, and design ingenuity, you’d expect from DB. The watch is in a 42mm titanium case (which actually is a nod to practicality, since titanium is light, comfortable, and very resistant to corrosion) and has three concentric chapter rings for (from the outside in) the local time, time in a second time zone, and the date. All three chapter rings have Arabic numerals and each ring uses a different font, in order to make them easier to tell apart. The center of the dial has a depiction of the Sun, which appears to be setting over the horizon, surrounded by sunrays, and below is a depiction of the night sky and the Milky Way. The blue night sky is in heat-blued titanium, with individually applied gold stars and the hour, minute, and date hands are heat-blued steel.

The movement is classic De Bethune. Caliber DB2507 features De Bethune’s signature blued titanium balance with gold regulating weights, the Triple Pare-Chute antishock system, De Bethune’s in-house balance spring, which is designed to provide the benefits of a Breguet overcoil but without the added height, and two mainspring barrels, delivering a 5 day power reserve.

The most distinctive feature of the overall design, however, is the GMT hand — it’s not a conventional hand, but rather, a tiny sphere, with one rose gold hemisphere and one of heat blued steel, reminiscent of De Bethune’s signature spherical moonphase. Here, however, the sphere performs a different function — it acts as the day/night indicator, switching instantaneously from blue to gold and back again, to show AM or PM.

The De Bethune Perpetual Calendar Green

The De Bethune Perpetual Calendar Green is De Bethune in a somewhat more classical mode — some of the more dare-to-be-different elements of its more avant-garde watches, like the Dream Watches or the articulated lug DB25s, are absent, but this is appropriate for a complication as rooted in tradition as the perpetual calendar.

This is not however to say that the Perpetual Calendar Green even remotely resembles an ordinary watch. The outermost chapter ring, for the minutes, has what’s called a chemin de fer design, which is to say it looks like a railroad track and just inside, there’s a chapter ring for the hours, with Roman numerals, which helps give the watch the more formal feel you’d associate with the complication. The hour and minute hands are in mirror-polished steel, as is the date hand, and there’s a very traditional sub-dial display for the date, as well as two apertures for the month and day of the week.

So far this is fairly conventional but things start to veer away from standard perpetual calendar design at 12:00. This is where you’ll find De Bethune’s signature spherical moonphase display — one hemisphere is heat-blued titanium and the other, palladium, and the sphere rotates once per lunar month in order to show the phases of the moon more accurately than you can with a conventional flat moonphase disk. Below, there’s a leap year indication — useful for setting a perpetual calendar also for letting you know when you can look forward to an extra day in February.

Turn the watch over, and it’s all De Bethune. Caliber DB2324 is a 30mm, self-winding movement — automatic winding is usually preferable in a perpetual calendar as it helps avoid accidental stoppage of the watch and a subsequent laborious reset. It also means, of course, that you can keep the watch on a winder so it’s always up to date. We’ve also got De Bethune’s signature movement innovations, including the titanium balance wheel (here with platinum weights, rather than white gold) the De Bethune balance spring, and the triple pare-chute antishock system. On top is the titanium and white gold oscillating weight for automatic winding and that’s supported by an antishock system of De Bethune’s own design.

One of the most noticeable and attractive features of the watch is the green dial, which is decorated with a hand-applied guilloché pattern. This consists of 12 wave patterns radiating out from the center of the dial to each of the hour markers, and it’s another beautiful example, in this watch, of the marriage of innovation and tradition that characterizes so much of De Bethune’s watchmaking.

The De Bethune Kind Of Two Jumping GMT

The De Bethune Kind Of Two Jumping GMT is one of those watches that absolutely begs to be seen in person. It’s a truism among watch enthusiasts that you really have to see a watch “in the metal” to get a sense of its real impact, and that’s true and then some for the Kind Of Two GMT. The KOT GMT’s major design innovation, which was first seen in the Kind Of Two Tourbillon, launched in 2021, and which won the Best Tourbillon prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in that same year. That watch had two faces which showed a more or less traditional dial on one side, and on the other offered an open dial view of the movement, with the distinctive De Bethune triangular bridge.

The two faces came to you courtesy a swiveling case design, in which a round inner case, mounted inside the pivot points for the articulated lugs, could be flipped back and forth from one side to the other, depending on whether your mood was classical or avant garde.

The Kind Of Two Jumping GMT takes the Kind Of Two swiveling case design to its next and most logical step, which is to show the time in two different time zones. On one side of the watch, labeled “GMT” in red letters, is the display for the second time zone and here things look fairly standard. With the case rotated to show this face the crown’s at the bottom, and you set the GMT-side time by pulling the crown out to its second position. The GMT side also puts the jump in Jumping — the seconds hand is a jumping seconds hand, which jumps instantly from one second to the next rather than sweeping. A lot of enthusiasts will of course think of this as a feature of a quartz watch but the jumping (or deadbeat seconds, as it used to be called) is a mechanical horological complication in its own right and can be found in a small number of modern high end watches, as well as in some famous vintage models, like the Rolex Tru-Beat.

Turn the watch over and it’s full-on ultra-modern De Bethune — with, of course, all the hand finishing and design-forward elements you could possibly want. The triangular bridge over the two mainspring barrels is a classic, signature De Bethune design element, but here, it’s been dramatically opened up to reveal the wheel for the jumping seconds complication, so you get that kinetic element on both sides of the watch. The balance wheel is in titanium, with white gold inserts, the De Bethune balance spring is present as well. This side of the movement shows the hours and minutes in an usual way — to avoid cluttering the dial, the hours are displayed on a chapter ring surrounding the balance, and the minutes are show by a hand mounted on a peripheral gear wheel.

It’s one of De Bethune’s most satisfying watches. Not only is it visually very compelling — the swiveling Kind Of Two case is one of the most enjoyable instances of a double-sided watch currently available.