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Recommended Reading: Will yet another auction record be broken this weekend? The world’s most complicated wristwatch is up for grabs… Recommended Reading: Will yet another auction record be broken this weekend? The world’s most complicated wristwatch is up for grabs…

Recommended Reading: Will yet another auction record be broken this weekend? The world’s most complicated wristwatch is up for grabs…

Thor Svaboe

This might be exactly what we need to start 2021 with a BANG, and signal what we all hope is a strong year of growth for both the watch industry and consumer market in general. Auction results are a very important marker of the market temperature, and as WatchPro reminded us, this weekend sees the auction of the thoroughly mind-bending form of the Vacheron Constantin Tour de L’Ile, a vastly complex and equally dazzling micro-engineered piece of horological art. Everything is in place for a new auction record and a flying start to the year.

The Vacheron Constantin Tour de L’Ile boasts a frankly incomprehensible 834 components and took 10,000 hours to complete. With two dials – both front and back – and everything from a minute-repeating complication to a tourbillon and equation of perpetual time, this is one of Vacheron Constantin’s ventures into the absolute highest echelons of haute horlogerie.

Utterly beguiling, this 18-carat rose-gold wristwatch (if we can even call it that) sold for an original $2.1 million in 2005, and is estimated on the block for around $3 million this weekend.

 

Is this the kick-off we need for a fresh 2021?, I have high hopes. Have a read of the original article in WatchPro here, including quite a few other mouth-watering lots. And if you’re tempted to sell everything you own and bid, go to the Antiquorum website and get ready for an exciting Sunday auction, live from Monaco .