Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/111120
TimeWell Spent Complicated watches are the new luxury collectible. BY WILLIAM KISSEL Harry Winston���s 45mm Ocean Tourbillon Big Date Daniel Novela has spent the past 17 years building his impressive watch collection, which began with a classic Cartier he acquired in 1996 and has grown over the years to include a highly coveted Girard Perregaux WW.TC Financial Chronograph, a Panerai Luminor 40 mm and one of the first waterproof Rolex Oyster designs from the 1930s. ���These days I tend to look for gaps, in other words complications I may or may not have to fill a hole in the collection,��� says the Miami-based lawyer, one of a growing number of style savvy business professionals helping to elevate fine watchmaking into the same league of luxury collectibles once reserved for Old Masters paintings and rare wines. ���Now I���m looking for a vintage square watch, perhaps an old Omega with a triple date function, or a watch with a moon-face function,��� he says. According to the Christie���s auction house website, collectors like Novela have been pushing the company���s watch sales, its sixth largest business, into new stratospheres for more than a decade. Last summer, for instance, Christie���s reported a record $3.5 billion in global watch sales for the first half of 2012���an 11 percent increase over the previous year. Other auction houses such as Sotheby���s, which sold the most expensive watch in the world back in 1999 ($11 million for the Henry Graves Supercomplication), and Antiquorum, which is devoted exclusively to modern and vintage watch sales, say most transactions 200 BAL HARBOUR come from rare or limited pieces such as Audemars Piguet���s Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph sports watch (particularly the limited-edition Juan Pablo Montoya in 18kt rose gold), Officine Panerai���s 1936 California Dial Radiomir special edition (a reissue limited to 1,936 pieces in steel and 99 in platinum) and the PAM360 (limited to 300 worldwide), Patek Philippe���s Calatrava and IWC Schaffhauser���s Big Pilot. Such rare and complicated designs are considered trophy pieces, not your everyday watch purchase. Nevertheless, savvy collectors know that some of the most coveted watches these days aren���t necessarily limited to big name auction houses. Louis Breguet, who invented the tourbillon in 1795, still incorporates the gravity-defying balancing wheel in many of its highly complex Classique Grande Complication watches, including the newly-launched Tourbillon Messidor for instance. And the company���s Type XX timepieces, first created in the 1950s as civilian wristwatches patterned after those issued to WWI pilots and featuring code names such as Type 20, have now evolved into the company���s new Type XXII chronograph, a 44mm design updated with a silicon escapement and a flat balance spring whose frequency has been raised to 10 Hertz for exceptional regulating power. Both are limited and highly complex designs whose value will more than likely increase with time. At Audemars Piguet the focus is on the new Grande Complication version