Upsets, Surprises, And Business As Usual At Only Watch 2024
You pays your money and you takes your chances.
The 10th edition of Only Watch, the biennial auction to benefit research into therapies and (hopefully) an eventual cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, was held on May 10th after having been put on hold last year pending resolution of questions regarding its corporate governance and distribution of funds raised. While some participating brands backed out in the interim (16 total chose not to participate) 47 brands decided to stay the course.
The auction created a good deal of drama in the months leading up to the rescheduled date but also, as everyone knows who tried to follow it, Christie’s suffered a total site outage in the hours leading up to the auction, which meant no online bidding and no chance to follow along online while the auction was in progress. Live blogging on social media was the way to go – I stayed up to date watching the live stream on the Only Watch IG account, and Instagram stories from Revolution – but as of today, in what must be one of the biggest ongoing headaches for Christie’s, their site is still down. Christie’s described the problem as a “technology security issue” to the New York Times.
The final results were, under the circumstances, surprisingly robust. In 2021, total sales for Only Watch were CHF 30 million, for 57 lots over an auction that took over three hours to complete. This year’s abbreviated version still managed to raise CHF 28,320,000. (The first edition of Only Watch, in 2005, raised €1.9 million).
In looking at specific results, it’s hard to say whether or not some lower-than-expected results might have been due to the site outage, but one thing’s for sure – it’ll take more than a site outage to stop Patek Philippe from being the dominant force by far at Only Watch. The top lot was Patek Philippe’s grande sonnerie with minute repeater, a steel version of the reference 6301P, which Patek mega-collector Zach Lu won for a bid of CHF 15.7 million. The watch has a green flinqué enamel dial (the term refers to enamel placed over guilloché) and the case is in steel – with the words “only” and “one” on the sectors for the power reserve indicators. (There is also a deadbeat seconds complication in a small seconds subdial, which is irresistibly charming in this context). Current list for the regular production (if you can even use the phrase in this context) 6301 is exactly $1,454,080 so as you can see Lu paid what you might call a premium for rarity and exclusivity; nothing is more rare and exclusive than a unique piece and when that unique piece is in steel and says “Patek Philippe” on the dial all bets are off. The absolute record for any watch at Only Watch was set by Patek in 2019 for the steel version of the Grandmaster Chime, which sold for CHF 31 million.
There were no surprises in particular about the runner-up lots (and again, “runner up” is relative – very relative – when you’re talking about watchmaking at this level). The F. P. Journe Chronomètre Bleu “Furtif,” was what is expected from Journe at Only Watch: a unique piece which also represents the debut of a new movement which in this case was the caliber 1522, which shares some of the layout and twin barrel configuration of the caliber 1304 found in the Chronomètre Souverain.
The Furtif is furtive in a couple of ways – first, the grand feu enamel dial is designed so that the time cannot be read if you aren’t looking directly at the watch, so at least in theory the time can only be read by the wearer. It’s furtive also in the sense that two of its complications are hidden on the back – both the power reserve, and the moonphase indication. The case and bracelet are both in tantalum, and the watch hammered for CHF 2.2 million on a high estimate of CHF 400,000.
In a very close race, Rexhep Rexhepi’s Chronomètre Antimagnétique hammered at CHF 2.1 million on a high estimate of CHF 150,000. The fact that the estimate seemed very much a lowball figure plus the hammer price eventually reached, are both evidence, I think of a couple of things.
First of all, quality matters; secondly, reputation matters and third, classical design well executed in a beautiful and idiosyncratic design language really, really matters; you can have a highly complex watch that’s technically distinctive, but if the design’s too out there, unless your brand/name recognition is extremely powerful, you run the risk of a large segment of your possible audience deciding it’s too risky. This is one of the major challenges of Only Watch – you want to do something unexpected and off the beaten path, but there is fine line between the road less traveled and too off-brand.
You might be wondering how the watch is antimagnetic if there’s an open caseback, and traditional watchmaking materials have been used (a lot of highly amagnetic watches nowadays get there partly through the use of silicon components). The Chronomètre Antimagnétique has a double caseback – there’s an outer solid caseback which can be unscrewed – you know, when you’re a safe distance from your particle accelerator or your vintage prop-driven airplane’s magneto, or what have you – so you can admire the movement. The watch also uses stainless rather than the customary high carbon steel for all the steel movement components.
It seems as if at least for now there remains an enormous appetite for high grade time-only watches, with top grade hand finishing and since making such watches will for the foreseeable future remain inherently challenging, inherently time-consuming and inherently expensive, I think we can count on the category (which is a vanishingly small one, if you’re restricting yourself to things that are actually the real deal)
Other lots which performed extraordinarily well included the Furlan Mari Secular Calendar, which reached CHF 130,000 on a CHF 30,000 high estimate – pleasant to see the watch, which is ingenious and a brilliant piece of watchmaking produced in partnership with Dominique Renaud, the cofounder, with Giulio Papi, of Renaud & Papi; and Julien Tixier. There was also the Krayon Anywhere Only Watch (which shows the correct time of sunrise and sunset anywhere in the world with the aid of an adjustable internal cam system) – CHF 450,000 on a CHF 250,000 high estimate, and Moritz Grossman’s exercise in beautiful simplicity, the Tremblage Only Watch, which went for CHF 85,000 on a high estimate of CHF 45,000.
It was overall, a good time to be a relatively simple watch (or deceptively simple watch, like the Krayon Anywhere) made to a very high or superlative standard of craftsmanship. There were some puzzling underperformers, including the new Genta Mickey Mouse retrograde repeater, which only reached CHF 170,000 on a CHF 500,000 high estimate; the Bernard Lederer Central Impulse Chronometer, which only reached CHF 40,000 against an estimate of CHF 100,000-200,000; and the Trilobe Réconciliation, hammering at CHF 17,ooo against an estimate of CHF 25,000-35,000.
For the more unusual and offbeat designs it’s hard to not wonder to what extent lower results were a consequence of the absence of online bidding. Admittedly the URWERK Space Time Blade, which was sold so quickly you barely had time to blink, is a very unusual timepiece even for a company that makes very unusual timepieces as its stock in trade, but the result of CHF 65,000 on a CHF 80,000 high estimate still seemed like a head-scratcher. After all, in 2021, URWERK’s UR-102 hammered for CHF 280,000 on a high estimate of CHF 75,000, so it’s not as if overall it’s a distressed brand. Still, the degree to which the URWERK diverged from the firm’s usual unusual business as usual might have told against it; the same may be the case for the Lederer, whose black and green color scheme may simply been a bright green bridge too far for the fans of Lederer’s otherwise very aristocratic approach to watchmaking.
The whole thing reminded me slightly of the problem of dressing for the Met Gala – it’s a bit of a problematic situation; go classic and if you’re too classic, you get dragged for being unimaginative; go a little too crazy and you get dragged for being too weird. Only Watch is and has always been both a bellwether for perceived brand equity, and a place where producing something able to attract a good result – the point of the whole thing, both for the auction and for the perceived value of the participating brands – is fraught with challenges and in any given year, depending on how far a brand pushes its own design language, you can knock one out of the park or whiff (and everything in between).
The one thing that never changes is the absolute persistence of Patek Philippe as the unquestioned king of the auction – whether or not any Only Watch Patek is objectively the best watch in the auction is a matter of personal taste; but the results speak for themselves. The safe thing for brands to do, I guess, is stay in their lane and not mess too much with the formula that gave them their success, but I hope the overall trend in tastes in watchmaking and the results don’t make watchmakers who are participating too risk averse. I didn’t personally love some of the more vehemently disruptive watches in this edition of Only Watch, but I’m glad they were there.