With Watches and Wonders 2025 approaching, soon information about a vast variety of new watches is going to flood our phones and desktops. Some brands, though, do early releases to allow watch lovers and enthusiasts a calmer, more paced look at their novelties. One such brand is Czapek & Cie. Only 6 days to the big event, and Czapek & Cie. has introduced the Antarctique Tourbillon. The launch marks the 10th anniversary of the brand’s revival, and also the 180th anniversary of the brand’s founding year.
While in 2024, the brand chose to create more elegant, dress watches new the then new Promenade collection and its Promenade Goutte d'Eau and Promenade Guilloché Ivoire variants, as well as two Antarctiques - Antarctique Green Meteor, and Antarctique Passage de Drake Afterglow - this time the brand has introduced a high-horology timepiece with the Antarctique Tourbillon.
The highlight of the watch is the brand’s in-house designed, conceived, and constructed Calibre 9. The movement architecture features slender bridges, which allows the tourbillon, gear train, and barrel to be revealed vertically on the face of the dial. The flying tourbillon is at 6 o’clock, hovering between the dial and the mainplate. The gear train is beneath the dial connected to the tourbillon directly under the extra long finely curved minutes bridge; the barrel is located at 12 o’clock.
“Our pursuit of aesthetics drives us to create mechanical beauty,” says Czapek CEO, Xavier de Roquemaurel. “It’s an iterative process, where changing a line changes both mechanics and aesthetics, which can lead to an intense ping-pong between the constructor-engineer and the designer-artist …with me playing the wild card in the middle.”
The dial of the watch is decorated with a trompe l’oeil guilloché design called Singularité, for which the brand onboarded Metalem, their long-term partner. It may appear simple however, it is designed in such a way that gives an infinite depth effect. Unlike the usual guilloche, in which the guillocheur starts from a single point to cut the lines, in Singularité the starting point moves with each passage of the lathe. Further, the hour markers are attached to the flange to maintain the aesthetics of the dial.
On the reverse side, there is a convex gold oscillating weight, which is decorated with a hand-engraved pattern similar to the dial by Michèle Rothen, the brand’s independent master engraver.
The watch comes in variants depending on the dial - Glacier Blue, Photon Sphere, and the mythical grey Secret Alloy, a limited edition of 50 pieces. All iterations will also be proposed in stainless steel.
Images: Courtesy Czapek & Cie.
Also Read :
Watches and Wonders 2025 Ressence’s new TYPE 7 debuts with two GMTs
|
Watches and Wonders 2025: Trilobe's latest collection Une Folle Journée keeps time flowing
|
Bangalore Watch Company’s new collection celebrates The Great Indian Outdoors
More In news
Sign up for our newsletters to have the latest stories delivered to your inbox
