Girard Perregaux

Since about 18 months ago, when I for some reason (I have erased that part in my memory) sold my very first GP I owned, the Richeville 2750, I have been thinking about acquiring it back. I’m sure I must have had my reasons at that time, probably funded another GP or already had quite a number of other Richevilles in my collection, but when you look at the budgets involved, it did not make sense.

Here is a photo of my previous Richeville 2750, I let go.

Now you need to know that when I bought this Richeville back in 1997 it actually had a blue dial (Roman numerals) and a tan brown strap, like this (sorry, only found this photo on the WWW with plastic wrap).

I was living in Hong Kong at that time and most of the year it is pretty hot and humid, so the brown strap did not have a long lifespan and when I came across the black dial with the exploding numerals, I took the watch into the Hong Kong GP service centre and had it changed to black/black. I’m sure they had returned to me the old blue dial, but I must have lost that during one of my moves.

Then 6 months ago, I saw a Richeville blue dial with Arabic “exploding” numerals and tan brown strap for sale in excellent condition and I wanted to jump on it. Unfortunately, the deal fell through as the seller was not keen to ship overseas and we also could not agree a reasonable price.

In the end and what I learned over the years, patience will pay off one day and this is how I found this blue dial, Arabic numerals Richeville 2750 from a dealer in the U.S.:

It had a non-original strap, so I had it shipped without.

Straps:

Talking about straps. I’m quite peculiar about that part. I have experimented with non-original replacement straps, but it’s somehow not right and not satisfying. So over time I have built up a collection of GP straps and grab them whenever they are on offer. Sometimes, I find myself buying a strap and then thinking about which watch I need to get to match it with that strap. A little mad, I know.

Combinations:

So here we go, getting ready available options for the blue dial Richeville. Some are used on other watches, but there were 5 possibilities:

The medium brown with small scales?

Okay, but I think we can do better.

Maybe darker brown with white stitching?

Good, but I really don’t want to take that strap off the Richeville 2520 with black dial. So let’s keep on trying…