The Van Cleef & Arpels Heure d’Ici & Heure d’Ailleurs

Van Cleef & Arpels may not the be the name first in watch enthusiast’s minds when they think of major innovations in watch design and in watchmaking, but in the years that I’ve had the chance to see their wristwatches and clocks, I’ve seen a really incredible number of fascinating and in many instances, unique complications. Their “Poetic Complications” in recent years, to pick just one example, have included the Heures Florales watch, in which the time is read from a garden of flowers which open and close to show the hours. This is all by way of saying that Van Cleef, like Cartier, can be much more serious about technical watchmaking than you might think. One such watch is the Heure d’Ici & Heure d’Ailleurs – which though it sounds like two watches, is actually a single watch, but with two time zones.

At a time when smaller, more elegant, and more sophisticated watches in general are having a moment (actually, much more than a moment; Cartier’s retro-revival Privé watches are the talk of the town every year at Watches And Wonders Geneva) it’s also a good time to look back at Van Cleef’s history in creating what used to be called men’s “dress” watches as well. The various Pierre Arpels models go back to a watch that Pierre Arpels, grandson of one of the founders, had made for himself in 1949, and which had distinctive, bar-shaped, or “T-Bar” lugs attached at their midpoints to the top and bottom of the case. The design apparently originated with Louis Cartier, who patented it in 1934, but appears to have not done much with the design at the time, and Pierre Arpels took advantage of the design when the patent expired.

Louis Cartier And Pierre Arpels

The design gradually caught on (Cartier eventually used it more broadly  as well, and the lugs are sometimes called “Vendôme” style lugs after the holding company that owned Cartier, as well as, at one point, Piaget, Baume & Mercier, Karl Lagerfeld, and other luxury brands). The Pierre Arpels watches became a niche, but more or less permanent, part of Van Cleef’s collections, right up to the present day. Thanks to the relationship between Piaget and Van Cleef, first as co-brands in the Vendôme Group, and then in the Richemont Group (which bought and then dissolved the Vendôme Group in 1998) the Pierre Arpels watches have in the past used Jaeger-LeCoultre as well as Piaget movements, including the 9P (which debuted in 1957) and, today, the Piaget 830P, which at 2.35mm thick is, more or less, a descendant of the even thinner 9P (2mm).

The Heure d’Ici & Heure d’Ailleurs may have a somewhat cumbersome name (it means, in French, “time here and time elsewhere”) but in its design, it is very much in keeping with the overall feel of other Pierre Arpels watches, which is to say that despite being more complicated than its time-only brethren, it wears its complications lightly – and behind the complications, is considerably more ingenuity than you might think.

The Heure d’Ici & Heure d’Ailleurs is a two time-zone watch, with jumping hours displays for both local and home time, and with a retrograde minutes display. The name of the watch is on the dial opposite the minutes arc, in a rather lyrical Italic font, and it works from a design standpoint in that it balances the minutes track and emphasizes what you might call the symmetrical asymmetry of the design overall. The watch  was originally launched back in 2012 and it appears to have been in Van Cleef’s catalog ever since – It has appeared in a number of variations, including a very beautiful one with a deep blue dial for Only Watch 2015, and it was a GPHG nominee in 2014 as well.

Deceptively Simple By Design

Although it appears to be a relatively simple watch at first glance (which is I think by design; Van Cleef’s complicated watches are almost always, all about visual clarity and design elegance, rather than the celebration of complexity per se) there are a lot of very, very charming details that show a great deal of attention paid to every aspect of the watch. The lugs are spherical where they attach to the case, making for an elegant transition from case to lug, and there is a small but distinct step on the two ends of each bar as well.

Turn the watch over, and you’re in for maybe the Heure d’Ici & Heure d’Ailleurs’ biggest surprise. The movement is immediately and obviously not any sort of standard caliber – you might have expected Van Cleef to have used, perhaps, a base automatic Piaget movement with some sort of module, and in fact, that’s what the company tried at first. Or, I should say, that’s what the company’s partner tried at first.

For technical support, Van Cleef turned to Jean-Marc Wiederrecht, founder of the complications specialist Agenhor, perhaps most famous for its (and his) remarkable next-generation chronograph movement, the Agengraphe (as seen in the Moser Streamliner chronograph, and the MING 20.01 Mosaic, among others). Wiederrecht originally thought of a module as the most logical solution but as it turned out, making a movement thin enough for the complication, as well as able to power both hour disks and the retrograde minute hand, wasn’t possible without designing a movement from scratch.

What you end up with in the Heure d’Ici & Heure d’Ailleurs, is, amazingly enough, a completely unique calliber. The configuration of the bridges is unlike anything you’ll see in any other watch; the movement uses a platinum micro-rotor (in order to keep the movement as flat as possible) and overall, it’s got a level of out-there, post-modern-mechanics sophistication that I absolutely would not have expected from Van Cleef, especially not at this price and especially not with as an exclusive from Agenhor.

Enduringly Elegant Watchmaking

Looking at this watch made me think, by the way, of an old friend who passed away just recently: Mr. George Cramer, “Geo” to his friends (and everyone was his friend) who was known to us all as a consummate expert on Cartier in particular, and a consummate gentleman in every respect in general. It turns out that he wrote a quite beautiful appreciation of this watch, for Revolution, and reading it reminded me both of his incredible generosity with his unbelievable store of knowledge (it is entirely consistent with his character that he wore his erudition very lightly) and of the whole idea of dressing up, in general, and wearing a dress watch, in particular.

Van Cleef says that the watch “provides a poetic interpretation of travel with its dual time zone inviting you to constantly drift from dream to reality,” and while there is a little bit of hyperbole in the description, I don’t think that there is any denying that the watch is about as far removed from conventional notions of a GMT/two time-zone watch as you can get.

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