Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar and the Price of Exclusivety

A watch is a watch is a watch, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, though it is also incontrovertible fact that some watches are more watch than others.

Take the 1944-vintage Patek Philippe perpetual calendar chronograph recently sold at auction by Christie’s in Geneva.

This is a spectacularly beautiful wristwatch with exactly that combination of rarity and quality, antique glamour and inbuilt technical wizardry to please a hungry bidder.

Still, nobody was expecting bids to reach £3.8m before the last but one bowed out. It thus leaped into second place on the all-time list for high-priced watches (behind a 1933 Patek Philippe). Not only that, it was part of a lot of 20 watches put up by the same collector that fetched a total of £9.7m. And they said the age of luxury was dead.

There will always be a buyer for rare quality, of course, though in watches as in wine that buyer comes increasingly from China rather than the United States. What price, though, the watch that is not a watch.

Enter the H8 Flying Sculpture by Swiss horologist Beat Haldimann. It is not the first remarkable design from the House of Haldimann, which has been producing idiosyncratic custom watches since 1991.

His unusual H1, which featured a large, centrally placed flying tourbillon, debuted to widespread acclaim at Basel-2002. His latest innovation is considerably more ‘out there’, though, a watch without hands and so incapable of telling the time.

Commissioned by a collector of sculpture, it answers his requirement for a sculpture he can carry around on his wrist. But the handless H8, all of which save for the alligator strap and the sapphire crystal was made in-house, also raises searching questions about the tyranny of time – the visible movement suggests time passing but does not measure it - and about what a watch really is.