Hands On, And In Depth: The Discreet Charm Of The Daniel Roth Extra Plat In Rose Gold

The Daniel Roth Extra Plat is the second model in the revived Daniel Roth brand, and like the tourbillon which preceded it, it was first introduced as a Souscription model with a closed caseback, in yellow gold. Last month, the regular production model in rose gold, with an open caseback, was introduced, and Daniel Roth made one available to me for several days. For all that it’s a simple watch – time only, hours and minutes – there is an enormous amount of depth to it, with a level of pure watchmaking content that has become difficult to find in series produced watches outside the world of independent horology, where it’s practiced by only a few individuals on a very small scale.

For all intents and purposes, despite the fact that Daniel Roth is now an undertaking of LVMH’s watch division and therefore has resources that small production high touch indies do not, the company still operates at a small scale and appears likely to do so for the foreseeable future. The Daniel Roth Extra Plat is under less immediate pressure to show a profit, therefore, than an introduction from a small batch independent operating on a relative shoestring budget, but that means it doesn’t have the benefit of the doubt that is often extended to those artisans perceived to be operating as outsider iconoclasts, and its work, under the direction of Jean Arnault, Enrico Barbasini and Michel Navas, has to produce the impression of an unimpeachable standard right out of the gate.

The Daniel Roth Extra Plat is a watch with just a few elements but each one is handled with obvious care and obvious attention to detail. The dial is two tone, with a gold chapter ring, engraved with a radial guilloché pattern on three concentric rings. There is a very discreet ring of markers for the minutes printed on the dial, which are not so small as to be perfunctory, but which are small enough to not overcomplicate what’s obviously intended to be a texturally rich but classically restrained design.

The hour and minute chapter rings are finished with a brushed circular patter, with the rings of guilloché increasing in width from the innermost to the outermost, and the inner circle of the dial, as well as its outer area, are engraved with a vertical pinstripe pattern. Hands are thermally blued, with arrowhead tips. The whole effect is one of bespoke and self-confident luxury, without any hint of ostentation or striving for effect, and in its combination of detail and clarity it’s reminiscent of the work of Breguet, and of his influence on the work of Daniel Roth when he launched his own company.

The same is true of the casework. The double ellipse case is constructed as a three-tiered structure, and it’s a very subtle piece of work. Except for the sides of the lugs, there are no straight lines anywhere. The bezel and caseback are arched in their cross sections, and there is a gadroon running along the entire edge of the case, which runs through the lugs and is interrupted only by the crown. (The term “gadroon” refers to a type of motif found in several of the decorative arts, including ceramics, metalworking, and jewelry making; in general, it means convex curves used as a decorative element).

The upper surfaces of the lugs are gently rounded as well, and the crown is decorated with an ellipse that reflects the overall outline of the case.

I said that there are no straight edges on the case except for the edges of the lugs (well, and the knurling on the crown, I suppose) and you might object that the flanks of the case are straight,  but they’re not. They curve very gently inward, and it’s a detail that’s easy to miss at first, but it’s part of the overall vocabulary of complex curves that gives the case its character.

Caliber DR002: A Study In Subtlety

The Souscription model is one of those things that I admire greatly in theory, but in practice I’d regret not being able to see the movement (although if I’m not misremembering, Daniel Roth will supply owners of the Souscription with an open caseback if desired). Caliber DR002 represents the biggest difference between Daniel Roth’s original Extra Plat models from 1990 and 1991, which were powered by supplied movements – the automatic, by the F. Piguet caliber 71, and the manual, by the F. Piguet caliber 21. The caliber DR002 was designed and is assembled at Louis Vuitton La Fabrique du Temps, with component manufacturing taking place at Le Cercle des Horlogers. It shares some obvious general characteristics with its predecessor, the DR001 Tourbillon caliber, but the architecture is quite different, thanks to the absence of the tourbillon carriage. The DR002 is not in the very strictest sense of the word, an extra flat caliber, at 31mm x 28mm x 3.1mm – the most well known hand wound extra flat or ultra thin hand wound movements are 2mm thick, like the venerable Piaget 9P, or less – but it is still a relatively slim movement in a relatively thin watch, whose design is of course directly derived from the original Extra Plat Daniel Roth watches. Caliber DR002 was also engineered from the outset to be a base for complications.

Because the tourbillon carriage in the DR001 is located on the dial side of the movement plate, the view through the caseback is simpler than for the DR002, where the entire going train, including the crown wheel, ratchet wheel, mainspring barrel, going train, and balance are all visible. While the DR002 shares with the dial, a sense of disdain for striving for obvious effect, it is nonetheless very impressive even at first glance, and even more so on closer inspection.

The crown wheel, mainspring barrel, and center wheel, with its large ruby jewel, are located under a single complex bridge, whose outer edges conform to the shape of the case. The curve begins adjacent to the crown wheel, and loops gracefully around the jewel for the third wheel, arching over the center wheel pivot and terminating in a sharp inner corner. It then curves towards the edge of the case before angling upwards around the balance cock, where there is a sharp outer transitional point, on the midline of the outer curve of the balance cock. The geometry of the first part of the curve, before the sharp point, traces a curved imaginary line that intersects and matches with the curve of the balance – like the curves on the case flanks, a very subtle detail that’s easy to miss.

The steelwork is of the finest quality and superior workmanship. The ratchet wheel for instance, has mirror finished teeth with polished, beveled tips and flanks, with the outer part of the wheel decorated with snailing. The inner part of the wheel is set in a polished countersink, and screw heads are individually black polished, with beveled heads, beveled and polished slots, and of course the screws, like all screws in the movement, are set in polished countersinks as well. The steady pins for the bridge and click spring are mirror polished on their tips, and the click spring is an example of excellence in craft all on its own – hand tempered, and straight grained, with the terminal end of the spring gracefully rounded to match the curvature of the bridge.

The sharp outer point of the bridge terminates harmoniously at the point of the click spring which prevents the mainspring barrel from unwinding (it is interesting to reflect that the entire pressure of the going train bears against this single point, which allows the energy of the mainspring to be directed through the going train to the escape wheel, lever, and balance).

The bridge for the third, fourth, and escape wheels has a a series of comples curves as well. The inner edge has an especially graceful transition near the third wheel jewel, where it rises to a crest before descending and then ascending around the jewel itself, before terminating at a sharp inner angle. The shape is rather reminiscent of an ocean wave, frozen in the moment of cresting and beginning to break.

One of the greatest visual pleasures a traditionally laid-out going train offers is the graceful, seductive logarithmic spiral formed by the train wheel pivots and jewels as they curve towards the balance. You can follow the spiral all the way from the center wheel jewel – this is the largest of the going train jewels, in order to support the larger diameter center wheel pivot, which carries the highest side load of the the entire going train, and which is the slowest turning wheel in the going train. As you move along the spiral, the train wheels turn faster – one hour at the center wheel, and every sixty seconds at the fourth wheel – and the pivot side load decreases, as do the diameters of the pivots.

High standards are maintained right through to the escapement and oscillator components.Even the bridge for the lever is straight grained, with a complex curved contour and rounded anglage, and is held in place with polished screws and polished steady pins. Like the click spring, the balance spring stud is a miniature paean to classic watchmaking, black polished, beveled, and with polished screws sitting in polished countersinks. It’s remarkable to consider the number of individual operations that go into watchmaking at this level. For just one screw, the screw has to be machined, and then, the slot has to be beveled, the edge of the head has to be beveled, and the head has to be black polished, and as well, the bevels have to be polished, along with the walls and bottom of the screw slot.

The level of finishing is remarkable on a couple of levels. First of all, it’s to a standard which most large volume luxury brands can’t sustain as a manual craft, simply because the volume of watches they produce precludes it. I hasten to say that of course it doesn’t mean it’s completely absent and has been entirely replaced by machines, but as the always reliable SJX pointed out in his article, “Movement Finishing In The Instagram Age” hand finishing skills take years to acquire, are practiced by few, and do not and cannot scale. The interest in authentic fine hand finishing in watchmaking in the modern era, can probably be traced in part to Philippe Dufour, whose Simplicity watches have defined the expectations of a whole generation of collectors, and more recently, of independents whose approach is designed to visually emphasize the qualities which meet the expectations of collectors, who wish for those qualities – most notably, sharp inner corners on anglage on movement bridges – to be both numerous and visually obvious.

Exceptions can be found to virtually any generalization about movement finishing. On the one hand, to an eye accustomed to the relative restraint found in hand-finished watches from the pre-World War II era, and post World War II, in fine watchmaking brands, some of the modern hand finished movements from independents can seem to try too hard to impress.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that if you look at some of the very finest mechanical watches – especially pocket watches, which offered great scope for the exercise of innovation in movement design as well as in demonstrations of craft – you can see flourishes just as baroque as anything you might see in even the most flamboyant modern hand finished watches. Still, I think that the restrained approach taken by Daniel Roth and La Fabrique du Temps in the caliber DR002 is enormously appealing – you feel (or I do anyway) a closer connection to the history of fine hand finishing as an extension of good workshop practices, and of natural pride in one’s work. After all, most of the most beautiful hand finishing in watches would have been invisible to the owner – watchmakers engaged in it out of a natural sense of loyalty to maintaining high standards, a sense of responsibility to the company, and of course, a sense of responsibility to their colleagues, and to themselves.

The second big takeaway I have from spending time with the Daniel Roth Extra Plat, is the degree to which everything functions as an integrated whole; all the individual parts of the watch, in form, finish, and function, seem to be aware of each other, so to speak. For movement enthusiasts this is perhaps the most obvious in the beautifully harmonious design of the movement bridges, where each of the graceful shapes is designed to be part of an overall composition (this is one infrequently noted but distinguishing fact about the Simplicity: it works beautifully as a composition, which is not always the case even in the highest end hand-finished watches). This composition arises partly out of the organization inherent to a traditional hand wound movement and going train, but Daniel Roth’s caliber DR002 has unveiled that latent beauty in a most thoughtful and sensitive way.

Daniel Roth today of course benefits from the original design genius of the brand’s founder, but their decision to approach reviving the brand as custodians of its spirit means that we’re not just getting slavish reproductions of Daniel Roth watches from the original production in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Instead, the team at La Fabrique du Temps has shown great sensitivity to what made those designs successful – knowing when to leave well enough alone is a rare thing in luxury watchmaking and it’s getting rarer by the minute – and has created watches which represent the integration of mechanics and aesthetics, with the basic principles of watchmaking, that make fine watchmaking worth our support and interest today. The Extra Plat feels aristocratic, sure, but in a benevolent way; you could see wearing it for everything from a dinner engagement, to puttering in your garden, to taken long walks through wind and rainswept forests; for all its refinement, it still feels – as a natural outcome of its philosophy about what defines luxury and fineness in watchmaking – like a watch that should be lived with, and worn, every day.

The Daniel Roth Extra Plat In Rose Gold: case, 5n rose gold, 38.6mm x 35.5mm x 7.70mm; water resistance 30 meters. Dial, hand-guilloché decorated with thermally blued hands. Movement, caliber DR002, running at 28,800 vph in 21 jewels, 31mm x 28mm x 3.1mm, hand assembled and hand finished, with 65 hour power reserve. Price, CHF 49,000; available now.

The 1916 Company is proud to be an authorized retailer for Daniel Roth watches. For availabiltiy, view the Daniel Roth Extra Plat in our collection.