Phillips Watch Auction Geneva 9

BenBagbag

Can people post pictures and lot numbers of the watches they are referencing? It's hard for me to keep track as it is and will be harder for people who want to reference this thread in the future... 😀

Evitzee

one of the most important wristwatches of the 20th century

davidswiss

Lots of nice stuff but the one I wanted but can no longer afford went cheaply in comparison with the big money flying around.
The Ingenieur lot 171

https://www.phillips.com/detail/IWC/CH080119/171

crl848

I don't think the Lesson One prices were representative of market. For example in the Hodinkee "reference points" article on PNs in 2014, a 6241 was valued at a 10-15% premium to a 6239 worth $75k (mid-2013 auction value), i.e. 83-86k. Decent 6241 PNs were being sold at around 170k in 2017, so 220k + premium today looks like continued gains to me.

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/reference-points-the-paul-newman-daytona

MTROIS

Thanks for chiming in!!
I initially thought that the 2013 prices I was referencing were hammer prices... whenever they were final prices with premium and all.
I will have to dig in more 1:1 comparisons for Daytonas, including non-PN, to see if my impression of prices leveling off is supported by facts or if it is just that... an impression.

MTROIS

...and this nearly "as new" Submariner 5508, Lot 213, is def. going strong...

Spacefruit

Black racing was ok. Rare as hens teeth and a bit cheap. It’s the larger subdial version with AML and no pro marking. I can not work out which version Is more valuable as the painted logo racing dial appears to be a whole new plate - that is an entirely new dial design, where as the non pro might be on the same plate as a standard dial. I personally like the pro version better for that special dial.

The gold BA145.022 was the round oval dial version. I can only imagine that a good one with the oval dial will hit $100k soon.

MSNWatch

Looks like the buyer of lot 676 heard about @mac_omega and his new book!

Evitzee

You ask a fair question. To someone not plugged in to the history and development of the wristwatch this would just seem to be another complicated watch, the kind we see today coming from many manufacturers. Yawn. But if you go back to 1935 and the technology available, this was a huge deal. Wristwatches were just coming into their own after really being popularized around WWI. Complicated pocket watches had been around for over a hundred years, but miniaturizing complications like calendars and minute repeaters to fit in a wristwatch was a difficult exercise, only the best workmen would take on that kind of challenge and it was a slow and tedious process. Truly hand made watches. So in 1935 Vacheron Constantin gets a request from a wealthy client who wants a minute repeater and a perpetual calendar in a wristwatch. In that time frame there are only two other watches that complicated, a Patek Philippe retrograde calendar/minute repeater (now in their museum) and a platinum tonneau one that had a perpetual calendar, minute repeater and I believe a one button chronograph, the so called Shultz watch. It hasn't been seen in over 30 years. So here is VC, in the depression, being requested to make a very complicated watch that in todays dollars would cost about $1.2M.

It takes VC five years to finally make and deliver this piece. Only the top workmen could make the minute repeater mechanism, another person made the calendar mechanism, someone else made the complicated case, same with the dial, etc, etc. The layout with the crown at 12 o'clock, the slide on the right side, along with a retrograde date, puts this watch into another realm as far as the wristwatch development was concerned. It was, is, a tour de force of that era. It joins the PP and the Schultz as the most complicated watches of that era.

The provenance is interesting, little was known about the watch until it was finally flushed out of the original owner's family and completely reconditioned after having sat in a poorly ventilated vault somewhere in Central or South America. It had never been polished, it had the original monogram on the back, the history of the owner became known, VC found the diagrams and ordering correspondence. The calendar is actually a perpetual calendar but the owner wanted simplicity so that part of the mechanism was disconnected. Again, the top people in the world today brought it back from the dead, Philippe Dufour and others. For someone who loves groundbreaking stuff this is a holy grail piece. Auction houses hype a lot of stuff, but this piece was not overhyped. It is a historically important piece in the development of the complicated wristwatch. It was a bargain, imo, at CHF 740,000.