Daniel Roth Introduces A New Version Of Its Fan Favorite Extra Plat, In Platinum

When the Daniel Roth brand was relaunched back in 2023 (it is hard to believe it was so relatively recently because subjectively it seems as if there has been much more than three years’ worth of water under the bridge since then) it was with a complicated watch – to wit, the Daniel Roth Tourbillon “Souscription,” which was a carefully, cannily, and thoughtfully updated version of watchmaker Daniel Roth’s C187 Tourbillon, originally released in 1988. Since then, the small company has released its new pieces on a very careful cadence, with non-Souscription tourbillon models announced next, followed by the first Extra Plat (extra flat) model in 2025. This was in turn, followed by the announcement of one of the most beautiful time only watches of the last decade (which is saying something given how many time only watches striving to be the most beautiful of their kind have been released in the last ten years) which is the Extra Plat Rose Gold Skeleton. A platinum version would seem to be the logical next step, and indeed, today a Platinum Extra Plat joins the collection.

By the numbers this is the same watch as the Extra Plat models in yellow or pink gold: the case is 38.6mm x 35.5mm x 7.7mm, with a water resistance of 30M, and with sapphire crystals front and back. Platinum in this context might feel not especially noteworthy, but the platinum variant, thanks to the density of the material, has a real physical authority on the wrist. I think it’s possible for extra flat, and ultra thin watches to be impressive in terms of their engineering but perhaps a little unsettling to wear thanks to their light weight (sometimes, of course, the low mass is the whole point of the exercise; extra light watches are their own separate albeit rather small genre). My own preference after many years of admiring and desiring extra flat watches as a class, is that you need a little bit of weight as a counterbalance to the diminutive physical dimensions.

One of the perennially fascinating aspects of fine watchmaking is how you start out with some very basic materials and elevate them through the application of sensible engineering, good taste in design, and craft in execution (this is true of the arts and crafts in general of course; the value of a painting in the collector market usually has nothing to do with the cost of the materials used to make it). The materials used to make watch movements haven’t change, basically, in hundreds of years (although there have been some updates to materials and methods used for finishing). You can construct a whole, high precision, fully functional watch movement using just a handful of materials: steel, brass, and synthetic rubies, plus of course whatever you use to plate the brass, and the necessary lubricants. That’s a very small cast of characters for producing some of the most dazzling manifestations of human ingenuity and when the work benefits from handwork, so much the better.

The caliber DR002 is a little unusual by the standards found today in a lot of hand-finished, high end, time only mechanical watches, in that it exhibits both a high level of craft as well as a certain level of restraint.

We can add a couple more materials to modern movements like cal. DR002, but not many – a Nivarox-type alloy balance spring; a Glucydur balance, and that’s about it. Other than that there is nothing in this movement that you couldn’t have found in a hand-wound wristwatch movement from the 1920s, and of course, in this context, it’s a feature, not a bug. As with every watch so far from Daniel Roth 2.0, finishing throughout is excellent and it is hard to find anything to fault. Every component which would have been given a fine finish in a wristwatch a hundred years ago has received a similar treatment here. Steel parts are mirror polished where appropriate, or otherwise given a traditional fine finishing like the sunray spiral brushing on the mainspring barrel, which contrasts beautifully with the black polished upper face of the ratchet wheel. Screws are always a good place to look if you’re trying to evaluate movement finishing – here, all screws have polished and beveled heads and slots, and sit in mirror polished countersinks.

Sometimes movement finishing in hand finished watches from high end independents can feel just a little bit hyperbolic; here instead we have an example of fine finishing which feels connected to the roots of the practice, which arose as a combination of necessary touching up of components to remove burrs and other irregularities left over from manufacturing, with natural pride in expressing the potential beauty in a well-designed movement.

Of the hand finished time only watches currently on the market, this one, like its gold siblings, feels very close to the traditional roots of fine watchmaking in the Swiss-French idiom. It is a model of modesty on one level but on the other hand, it is extremely luxurious in the attention to detail you can find throughout the watch. And I love it in platinum. Gold has delights all its own, of course; as Auric Goldfinger says, he loves its “colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness,” but platinum has a remote, almost imperial dignity to it which gets harder to resist (for me anyway) every year. Every version of the DR Extra Plat that comes out seems to go to the top of my list of high end time only hand finished watches I would want to own, and would feel comfortable wearing on a daily basis, and darned if it hasn’t happened again.

The Daniel Roth Extra Plat, In Platinum: case, 38.6mm x 35.5mm x 7.7mm; platinum, with white gold dial decorated with pinstripe guilloché and with gold hands; 30M water resistant, with sapphire crystals front and back. Movement, the elegant model of restraint that is the caliber DR002; 31mm x 28mm x 3.1mm; hand-wound, running in 21 jewels at 4Hz/28,800 vph. Price, 65,000 CHF.

The 1916 Company is proud to be an authorized retailer for Daniel Roth watches. For more information on the Daniel Roth Extra Plat in Platinum,  as well as current US pricing, please contact us.