A Day at Audemars Piguet and Renaud & Papi

A Day at Audemars Piguet and Renaud & Papi
By Jeff Kingston, Kevin Ng and Hans Zbinden

Re-Discovering Audemars Piguet

How do you "discover" a watch brand that everyone knows? Indeed, initiates to the hobby of watch collecting no later than the first lesson or two acquire the words “Audemars Piguet” in their vocabulary. I can vividly remember my maiden tour in tow of my first watch sensei. While our wives went off in search of clothes bargains, my first watch collecting friend took me on an introductory tour of dozens of watch shops in Hong Kong and Kowloon. Determined to show me that world consisted of more than Rolex and Breitling, all that I then knew, our day was like a total immersion intense language school. I was bombarded with new vocabulary foreign to me: “Patek Philippe” (OK I had heard that one - just never looked at them); “Vacheron Constantin”, “Blancpain”, “Jaeger-LeCoultre”…And right there in the very first lesson - watch brands 101 - was Audemars Piguet. My sensei patiently explained there was a trilogy at the top: Patek, Audemars and Vacheron.

Fast forward to the present. So of course I knew of Audemars. I had known of them since Watch 101. Yet they were in a way unknown. There was no Audemars Forum on Timezone. Never has been one. Even Minerva has forum and you don’t learn about that brand until Watch post graduate studies. How many Audemars posts are found on the public forum ? So for years I had soldiered forth into the world of watches with my attentions focused elsewhere.

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Then the revelation. A friend came to dinner with the most stunning complicated watch I have ever seen. To look at it was mesmerizing. Here was a watch as complicated as they come - repeater, split-second chronograph, tourbillon that managed to elegantly hide its complications. “Try the chronograph” said he. And I did. Shock. The buttons were feather light. Creamy, even, in their feel. The starting, stopping and splitting of the hands perfect. The better word is “miraculous”. There was not a trace of jumping- ever. To me that was impossible. Column wheel chronographs built on a gear system (excepting those which employ a vertical clutch system for actuation such as the Blancpain 1185) depend upon an intermediate wheel with triangular teeth dropping down onto a center gear with half size triangular teeth. The contact point is random and some jumping when the teeth don’t perfectly mate at that instant can produce a little skip. The very very best chronographs in the world minimize this- maybe make it almost entirely go away (my Patek 3970 falls into this category; so does the Lange Datograph). But here was a watch where it was gone ! Perfect starting and stopping with the lightest touch on the pushers of any chronograph I had ever played with- and I have owned or played with the best. At that moment I knew that I had to learn more about Audemars Piguet, even if they didn’t have their own forum.

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So a plan began to hatch for Ferris Buehler to take another day off to go discover Audemars Piguet. After dozens of e-mails we had assembled a squad for the mission: Hans Zbinden and Kevin Ng, both devoted owners of Audemars Royal Oak Offshore Chronographs eagerly volunteered for a day that in true Ferris Buehler fashion would not only feature a visit to Audemars in Le Brassus, but would conclude with a dinner at Le Pont de Brent, the best restaurant in Switzerland, in Montreux.

Yet there was a problem. How could we call this a trip to “discover” Audemars? One cannot “discover” something that is known. Everyone knows Audemars. It is part of the mandatory curriculum in Watch 101. Kevin and Hans know Audemars well - they owned beautiful Royal Oaks. Indeed, I owned one Audemars myself, a white gold 3090 which I bought when I became intrigued by the debut of this new manual wind in-house movement. Yet on the other hand here was this complicated Audemars watch whose goodness should have been inspiring pages upon pages of posts, reviews and analysis on Timezone, but instead ticked away in obscurity. Since we couldn’t “discover” Audemars, at least we could “re-discover” Audemars to learn what was going on there that had produced this utterly exquisite complicated watch.

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I concur with Jeff’s observations. Indeed, when Jeff first suggested the title to this write up, I thought it was most strange, talking about discovering something that had, well, always just been there. But thinking about it, until recently, that was indeed the extent of most people’s knowledge of Audemars. They knew that Audemars existed, and had something called a Royal Oak, but that was it.

My first memories of this great brand came when I was but a teenager in the eighties when, during trips to my native country Hong Kong (okay, island) and courtesy of Cathay Pacific’s most informative in-flight magazine, Discovery, I saw ads for the most beautiful watches ever – Patek Philippes, Vacheron Constantins, Rolexes, Rados (yes Hans, Rados) and Audemars Piguets. I knew little about these watches back then, although these days, I know that those advertised watches were quartz. Still, incredibly beautiful. As the eighties progressed, the watches in those ads got more and more extraordinary – they were now equipped with moonphases, and their movements were now exposed and engraved. I remember Audemars had a most outrageously designed watch, a hommage to Ra, the Sun God, which boasted something they called a tourbillon. Hmm … those were the days; blissful ignorance.

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I started my discovery of Audemars Piguet in 1993. I was on vacation in Italy and one morning it was my turn to get up early and go down to the village to get fresh bread and a jar of Nutella for breakfast (rest assured, my culinary tastes have evolved since then). On my way back I stopped at a news stand to pick up a paper and spotted an issue of Orologi which I bought even though my Italian is terrible, as long as there was lots of pictures, I'd be happy. Back home I sat down with my new magazine, waiting for the others to get up.

I can't say I always liked the design of the Royal Oak but over the years, like all the best designs tend to do, it started growing on me. I had heard rumors about a planned chronograph version and was convinced that it would be the perfect watch for me. It was so easy to imagine what it would like like: just like any Royal Oak, but with three chrono dials and two pushers. Sporty yet elegant, understated and beautiful, comfortable to wear ....

The people who were on vacation with me claim that merely thinking about the wail that woke them that morning still makes their blood curdle. Somewhere in the back on page 97 it suddenly appeared. Offshore ? The Beast ! I frantically began deciphering the article, terrified it would turn out to be quartz - whew ! carica automatica ... good good ... read faster - or that it was only available in platinum - cassa in acciaio ... that's steel isn't it ? - or was it at the end a tiny little girls watch - con diametro di 45 mm woowooooooo !!! - I was simply overwhelmed that Audemars Piguet had dared to modify such an established design into something so radically different from anything else that was on the market back then. And what's with the crown and pushers ??? They're not rubber are they ? Soooo soooo cool !!! Nowadays my reaction may appear rather strange (actually it was) but at that time, a watch just wasn't 45 mm and it certainly didn't have have any rubber bits on it.

The last paragraph of the article contained a nasty typo, the price was listed at 15,900,000 Italian Lira, almost 10,000 USD in 1993. I was sure the writer had made a tremendous error converting from Swiss Francs to Lira ... boy was I ever wrong. Fast forward to October 25, 1997: The seed that was planted four years before on that day finally started to bloom.

Contents

Please click on the links below to view the chapters of the report. They can also be accessed directly from the navigation bar which you'll find on the bottom of each page.

Audemars Piguet Website

Audemars Piguet 125th Anniversary Exhibition

    As Time Goes By: The Art of Complicated Watches

    Audemars Piguet Wallpaper Galore !

    Review of the Audemars Piguet Offshore Chronograph

    The Audemars Piguet Starwheel by Stephen Sugiyama

    Videos and wallpaper on the Audemars Piguet website

    Videos from the Audemars Piguet factory on Timezone.com

Pictures by Hans Zbinden and Jeff Kingston

Jules Audemars Tourbillion Repeater Split Second Chronograph, AP 125th Anniversary Catalogue
Jeweled travel alarm clock, AP 125th Anniversary Catalogue
Calibers 2877, 2891, 3090, AP Complications Catalogue
Chronograph movement detail, AP Complications Catalogue
2870 Tourbillon, AP Complications Catalogue
Perpetual pocket watch, AP Complications Catalogue
Royal Oak and Royal Oak chronograph, AP website
Collection examples, AP website
Gerard Rabaey, relaisetchateaux.com
Pont de Brent building and dish , grandestables.ch

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