“It was very specific precision work,” Borgeaud says.Ī Patek Philippe gold and diamond coin watch On one occasion, it took him 12 attempts to perfect the spring for the opening mechanism a button at 3 o’clock was pressed to release the cover. Borgeaud was a Piaget jeweller between 19. Piaget, however, made watches between the early 1940s and mid-1990s by cutting one coin in half to craft a case into which it fitted a mechanism. Selmoni believes early coin watches were bespoke orders and then, between the 1960s and 1990s, the brand made 10-15 pieces a year, with 90 per cent being wristwatches.Ī Vacheron Constantin piece required two coins. While the company’s archives include references to coin watches in the second half of the 19th century, the first one of which it has a picture dates from 1927. He notes that prices for its coin watches have been rising in the past two years because there is more interest in Vacheron Constantin on the secondary market. “They offer us a rich storytelling and are very intricate and exclusive,” he says. Heritage Auctions sold seven coin watches in one sale in November a Patek Philippe Reference 801 gold $10 coin example from the 1980s fetched $40,000.Ĭhristian Selmoni, style and heritage director at Vacheron Constantin, is trying to acquire coin watches for the brand’s Les Collectionneurs vintage offering. “So, when they see a coin watch by one of those makers, it intrigues them in several ways: the brand name, the fact it’s a novelty . . . and that it is different from a wristwatch,” he says. Wolf says interest has increased because collectors who started with wristwatches are “branching out” into pocket watches by brands such as Vacheron Constantin, Patek Philippe and Rolex. Prices for rarer examples - by Patek Philippe, Rolex, Vacheron Constantin and Audemars Piguet - have risen by 20-25 per cent in the past two years, according to Jim Wolf, director of watches and fine timepieces at Heritage Auctions in the US, while those for pieces by Corum, Eska and Piaget have grown 10-15 per cent. Now, growing appreciation for the craftsmanship and rarity of these vintage pieces is driving interest from collectors. Many Swiss manufacturers housed their watch movements in coins to prove their ability to miniaturise them. “In the late 1950s, a lot of advertisements dedicated to ultra-thin watch making had a coin watch, either open or closed, or both, on the visual,” explains Alain Borgeaud, heritage manager at Piaget. When Piaget unveiled its manual-winding 2mm-thin calibre 9P movement at the Basel fair in 1957, it put a certain timepiece front and centre of its display, and on the cover of its catalogue, to highlight the technical innovation. Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
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