Jon
44
Patek UK
Hello
Last night my wife and I attended a Patek Exhibition at a dealer in Southampton. The Exhibition was organised through the UK Distributer, Rhone Products (which I discovered is a subsidiary of Patek rather than an independent company as I had previously thought). This was the first showing of the exhibition outside of London and I overheard that it will be moving around the country, including to Norwich and Stratford, in the coming weeks. It is well worth a look if you can get an invitation.
The idea of the Exhibition is to allow customers of the regional UK dealers to see some of the more complicated and unusual Patek watches which might otherwise only be seen in Bond Street in London, if at all.
Apologies for the lack of photos - my wife said she wouldn't be seen with me if I were taking pictures in the shop and so in the interests of marital harmony I didn't take a camera along!!
The exhibition comprised about 120 watches brought over from Geneva. Mostly there were Calatravas (including the new 5196 - platinum one, which seems to be a lot of peoples' favourite was particularly nice), officers watches and annual calendars.
I was interested to see the new Gondolo annual calendar (5135?). Although the versions present at the Exhibition were non-working, it was good to finally see the watch in the flesh. It is certainly larger than most of the current Pateks but it did not as oversized as I thought it would be having read the measurements. While I thought it was nice, particularly the white gold and platinum versions, it would not be a model I would rush to buy.
My wife was allowed to handle (while wearing white Patek gloves!) the completely diamond encrusted Twenty-4 model. It was white gold and had something like 36 carats of diamonds festooned across it. A picture of it appears at the start of the Patek website. It is an awesome example of gem setting but for ?250/300,000 it seems an lot of money for a quartz watch. My wife suggested that Patek should be making more, and more attractive, womens' manual and automatic watches but it was said that it is difficult to make small automatic movements and women don't want to have to wind manual watches each day. I am sure that Patek have done their market research on this but it seems to me that JLC's womens Reverso range is very attactive and successful (and no doubt the new JLC Ideale range will be as well) and Patek should be doing more to tap into this market.
The highlight for me was the chance to see and handle the Celestial. The model in the Exhibition was fully constructed but the movement had been locked so that it was not operational. It is certainly an ingenious piece but as an overall package I much preferred the platinum 10 day tourbillon which was shown on a beautiful honey coloured strap. The case, the dial, the movement and the strap were simply amazing and with the platinum case it had real heft!
However, my absolute favourite was the new perpetual calendar chronograph (5970). I have not seen the 3970 and so could not judge the differences but the 5970 was in a good size case, without being oversized, while the dial and movement (which I understand remains the same as the 3970) were simply awesome. Unfortunately my attempts to smuggle the white gold version out of the building were thwarted and when I explained I was overcome with WIS fever they decided not to report me to the police!!
Thanks for reading
Jon
