Skeleton Chronograph

For most of the 2010s, Daniel Roth's watches sat in the forgotten basket, priced at a huge discount to ordinary dress watches from the same years. Nobody seemed to care that this was the man who rebuilt Breguet before putting his own name on a dial in 1988.

Mine is a skeleton chronograph from The Hour Glass era, when Roth himself was still involved in the brand. The double-ellipse case, the salmon skeleton dial, the black Roman numerals: all of it is his voice, not a committee's. Next to my Breguet 3357 it makes a neat pair. One shows what he did for someone else's house. The other shows what he did when he finally had complete freedom.

The part I love is the minute counter. Some chronograph counters creep and many jump, but the mechanism doing it is always hidden under the dial. Not on this one. It waits sixty seconds, snaps forward a minute, and you watch the gears snap with it. I sat with my camera and watched a full minute pass, just to film one second of it.

The double ellipse measures roughly 41 by 38mm, and yellow gold with an open dial is not a shy combination. It wears larger than the numbers suggest. I keep it on grey leather to calm it down, and I still catch myself starting the chronograph for no reason other than to see the counter jump.

Then everything converged: the neo-vintage wave, the independents boom, LVMH reviving the brand in 2023. Last autumn a double-faced Tourbillon C187 sold for CHF 228,000, and early examples now list above USD 200,000. Is Daniel Roth still an underdog? Honestly, I am not sure. Whether this is the peak or an F.P. Journe situation, I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is that the mechanism did not change when the price did, and that is the only reason I would give anyone for buying one.