With just flour, water, yeast and a dash of salt, bakers create myriad types of bread.
With just three chords and a simple five-note scale, blues musicians create a vast and varied universe of songs.
Success in each of these fields requires a delicate balance of just a few components — much like the unforgiving work involved in a watchmaker’s creation of a time-only watch.
Pared down to the essentials, a “two-hander” watch displays hours and minutes, while a “three-hander” also includes a seconds hand. But however it is configured, a time-only watch presents one of the greatest challenges in the horological arts: conveying just time, and no more.
“Creating a time-only watch that is beautifully proportioned, beautifully styled, uniquely designed to the watchmaker’s own vision, maybe based a little bit on history, but really is unique to them, and then combining that with ultimate quality — that is extremely difficult to do,” Paul Boutros, head of watches for the Americas at Phillips auction house in New York, said in a recent interview. “Very few have done it well, but when you strap it on your wrist, it’s unlike anything.”
Perhaps the most significant decision for a watchmaker conceiving a time-only watch is whether to include a seconds hand. And if there is one, should it be mounted like the hour and minute hands (known as a “center seconds” hand) or be placed in a sub-dial (known as a “sub-seconds” or “small seconds” hand)?
Guido Terreni, the chief executive of Parmigiani Fleurier, describes the center seconds choice as “sporty,” because most dive and auto-racing watches use that design, and the sub-seconds as “classic” because it recalls the look of a traditional pocket watch. But there is another choice: For the brand’s minimalist Tonda PF Micro-Rotor model, “we chose not to have a seconds hand to give you this mood of the right balance between an elegant watch and sport watches,” Mr. Terreni said. “It’s really in the middle.”
Classic Power
Since wristwatches came into style during the early 20th century, some successful time-only formulas have become classics that anchor house designs.
Examples include the Cartier Tank of 1917, a diminutive rectangular two-hander generally considered the timepiece that swung the world from pocket watches to wristwatches. Another is the Patek Philippe Calatrava Ref. 96 of 1932, a round three-hander with a sub-seconds. Its minimalist lugs were formed from the same piece of metal as the case, a watchmaking first that became the de facto template for round wristwatches.
A century later, the wristwatch is no longer novel, and yet the power of the simplest time-only models to put a watchmaker on the map continues to be strong.
Consider the Kosovo-born independent watchmaker Rexhep Rexhepi. After years of creating complicated models in Geneva under the relatively obscure Akrivia label — including his esoteric 43-millimeter Tourbillon Chiming Jump Hour watch — in 2018 Mr. Rexhepi introduced the 38-millimeter Chronomètre Contemporain, a round three-hander with a sub-seconds. And in May 2024, Phillips sold a first-series Chronomètre Contemporain for more than $1.5 million; the original price was about $67,000.
“It’s totally mind-boggling,” Albert Ganjei, the founder of the Boston retailer European Watch Company, said about Mr. Rexhepi’s success. “My friends have orders with him that have not been filled for three years.”
A similar story could be told of Qin Gan, an independent watchmaker in Chongqing, China. He had been creating intricate watches by hand for years, including one with a mechanical dragonfly that flaps its wings, but last year his Pastorale II, a three-hander with a sub-seconds ($46,000), drew the interest of serious collectors. Mr. Qin said his waiting list, like Mr. Rexhepi’s, suddenly exceeded three years.
“You’re just looking for the nth-degree of that design, right?” asked Mark Cho, a watch collector and a co-founder of the men’s wear retailer the Armoury. “I think the Qin Gan really ticks those boxes.”
Mr. Cho said that he had a Pastorale II on order and that late last year he checked out a prototype in Hong Kong. The balance of elements on the dial, he said, is a fundamental part of its appeal, along with the proportions of the 38.5-millimeter case. “You hold it and the balance of the thing in your hands is great, the feeling of that watch on your wrist is great. It blends into the body,” he said.
Bigger Isn’t Always Better
Collectors accept that a measure of awkward chunkiness is often part of a watch with multiple mechanical functions, but they expect a time-only watch to be sleek.
“We sold the Grandmaster Chime owned by Sylvester Stallone last June,” said Geoff Hess, the global head of watches at Sotheby’s in New York, referring to the $5.6 million sale of the Patek Philippe timepiece.
That 47.7-millimeter watch, which is 16.07 millimeters thick to accommodate its 20 complications, is a “remarkable piece,” Mr. Hess said, “but in many ways it wasn’t wearable, because it’s so complicated, and that’s why even Sylvester Stallone kept it in its sealed package.”
When asked about time-only watches, Mr. Hess said he immediately “thought of the Simplicity by Dufour.” The Simplicity and Duality are time-only models with sub-seconds by Philippe Dufour, the celebrated Swiss independent watchmaker.
And in December 2024, Phillips hammered a $685,800 price for a Simplicity, originally about $35,000, and in June 2024, a $2.05 million price for a Duality, originally about $100,000.
Balancing the few elements involved in these pared-down watches is no less challenging when creating midrange models.
“When we start the design at Moser, we want to strip down that design to the essence,” said Edouard Meylan, chief executive of H. Moser & Cie. “It has to work with two hands, even the seconds should be removed.”
He said that, when he and his team were reworking designs after acquiring the brand in 2012, “my team couldn’t recognize our own watches.”
“So I said, ‘Listen, guys, the objective one day is that we can remove the logo and people will recognize that it’s a Moser,’” he continued. Today, its time-only watches carry no logo.
Mr. Meylan also noted that the height-to-width ratio of the case is key when creating a time-only watch, a guideline echoed by Naoya Hida, the Japanese watchmaker whose time-only watches are made in modest 36- and 37-millimeter dimensions.
A case and a movement are best designed in tandem, Mr. Hida said, something that mass-market watch brands can’t always achieve because “they need to create many size variations with one movement.”
After noting the challenges of building a watch around an existing movement and the need to avoid creating “a hockey puck,” Mr. Meylan said: “You need to find really something that is balanced, where you have the right movement, the right diameter and the right height, and at some point it’s about feeling. It’s what you like.”
The post The Elegant Simplicity of the Time-Only Watch appeared first on New York Times.
