Welcome to In The Loupe, Robb Report’s weekly newsletter about the best of the watch world, exploring the latest timepieces, movers, shakers, and watchmakers every serious collector should know. Every Tuesday.
Welcome to In The Loupe, Robb Report’s weekly newsletter about the best of the watch world, exploring the latest timepieces, movers, shakers, and watchmakers every serious collector should know. Every Tuesday.
By Victoria Gomelsky
In early 2020, Patek Philippe, regarded by watch collectors as the finest watchmaker in the world, opened a state-of-the-art facility in Plan-les-Ouates, the industrial suburb of Geneva that also is home to Rolex, Vacheron Constantin, Piaget, and other luxury watch factories.
Known as PP6, the building, once the company’s parking structure, occupies 133,650 square meters (that’s almost 1,500,000 square feet) across 10 floors, four of which are subterranean. It unites all of Patek’s production under a single, enormous roof.
The timing of the opening was both unfortunate and fortuitous. In March of that year, the start of the Covid-19 pandemic prompted a series of lockdowns that initially prevented workers from inhabiting the space. At the same time, demand, spurred by a surge of pandemic-fueled interest in collectibles, began to tick up, substantiating Patek’s rationale for investing 600 million Swiss francs (about $683 million at current rates) in the building in the first place.
The week after Thanksgiving, I was one of five editors from the U.S. to get the grand tour. As we entered the building through revolving doors, someone joked about getting our steps in. Seriously! The itinerary had us spending an entire day here, crisscrossing gleaming white halls as we visited one production team after another, from the bridge-making department to high horology.
If we’d been blindfolded and dropped inside the building unawares, we’d be forgiven for thinking we’d arrived at NASA, or maybe the National Institutes of Health. The facility is staffed by some 1,700 people, most of whom wear white lab coats, and can often be found seated beside microscopes in rooms flooded with natural light. The Patek operation is both artisanal and impressively industrialized—beginning with the CNC machines that pump, cut, stamp, and form, among other things, cases, bracelets, and the hundreds of minuscule components that comprise even the most basic Patek model. It’s this mix of uber-machine age production and handcraftsmanship that helps explain the brand’s unrivaled position on the Swiss landscape.
Our tour began in earnest in the bridge-making department, where we were given the opportunity to attempt the hand-finishing techniques that Patek has perfected—perlage, anglage, circular graining, and chamfering. “It’s like meditation," our tour guide explained as we watched workers peer through loupes, and, using abrasive tools, perform the laborious, repetitive work that is required to hand-decorate the tiniest of parts.
At one point, I donned finger gloves, like little pink rubbers, and attempted a technique known simply as “smoothing down." I roughed up the glove on the index finger of my right hand using sandpaper and then pressed it down on a bridge, dragging it along the length of the paper. My goal, as I understood it, was to add some etched parallel lines to the piece, part of a larger effort to imbue every single component that goes inside a Patek timepiece with the essence of handmade.
I thought about the prototype of the Calibre 89 that I’d seen the day before, when we toured the Patek Philippe Museum. Introduced in 1989 on the occasion of Patek’s 150th anniversary, the legendary pocket watch contains 1,728 parts—and to think, every last one has been hand-finished. Now multiply that attention to detail by 72,000, the number of timepieces the brand expects to produce this year, and it’s easy to understand why, in 2015, the company looked to the future and decided it needed a bigger space from which to operate.
After all, Patek had already outgrown its first building in Plan-les-Ouates, where it moved in 1996, becoming the first brand to join the suburb. According to a press release, “the objective at the time was to reunite under one roof the individual business activities that were previously distributed across over a dozen sites throughout the city and to thus secure the independence of the company in the long term. Although the new building was generously sized, it soon proved again to be too small to cope with the manufacture’s vigorous growth." Now, with PP6 in full operation, the original building, known as PLO—home to the customer service department and the administrative team, including president Thierry Stern’s office—is also being refurbished.
As we toured the high-horology pre-assembly department (we also visited the high-horology machining and hand-finishing rooms), we watched one woman working on the Ref. 6300 Grandmaster Chime, the most complicated Patek Philippe wristwatch ever made. With 20 complications, a reversible case with two independent dials and six patented innovations, the model required a mind-boggling 100,000 hours to develop, produce, and assemble. Beside her, a paper showing a blown-up version of the movement marked up with a rainbow of colors, each corresponding to a different component (1,366 in all), made my head spin. It might as well have been written in Martian.
Just before lunch in the enormous Patek cafeteria, we spent time with a master guilloche artist who used an engine turning machine manufactured in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1906 (he called it his “Rolls-Royce") and an 18th-century French technique to create the dial patterns that beguile collectors. It took him five years to learn how to use the machine—as he demonstrated for us, tiny spirals of metal shavings peeled off the dial. Next, we met a handsome young restoration specialist who’s been with Patek for a dozen years. He explained that his entire job centered on remaking wheels for timepieces that date from Patek’s founding year, 1839, until around 1930, a period when the brand did not keep spare parts on hand. Making a single wheel, which he does using a tungsten tool with a diamond-shaped tip, takes approximately 10 hours, he said—some jobs require that he make six or eight wheels. (Take note, collectors, so you’re not caught off guard when that hefty restoration bill arrives—the cost is based on the amount of time it requires.)
Of all the departments we toured, including bracelet-making, gem-setting, and rare handcrafts, the room I found most interesting was also the least action-packed. It was the archives, a darkened library-like space that houses the core of the brand’s ledgers, dating from 1839 to the end of the 20th century (21st century records reside in the PLO building). Arranged in large, dark colored volumes, the records of the brand’s manufacturing history contain the serial numbers for every case it has produced, as well as the serial number for the movement housed inside it. Since the 1880s, Patek has insisted these elements should be married.
The volumes were shelved behind glass so I couldn’t touch them, but their mere presence gave me a slight chill, not only because of the thousands of exceptional watches they documented—many owned by heads of state, captains of industry, and celebrities—but also because they are tangible markers of a living history that remains intact, inside this temple to analog technology known as PP6.
A letter signed by Thierry Stern, oversized and inscribed on a platinum-colored background, hangs in the archives, affirming what the existence of those volumes suggests. It reads: “Will a Patek Philippe still be a Patek Philippe in 100 years? We believe so. Because our watchmaking is of the highest level, we have faith that each of the hundreds of parts in our watches will function well into the future. With perhaps a little oil. This commitment is my personal responsibility. Watches made now cannot be a problem for my successors. Because at our family-owned company, they will be my sons."
It reminded me of something I’d seen in the high-horology pre-assembly department, where a small Christmas tree, one of many sprinkled throughout the manufacture, stood on a shelf near the door. It was strung with perhaps a dozen silver ornaments, each bearing a first name. The one that caught my eye said, “Adrien." Was it meant to represent Adrien Stern, Thierry’s elder son and heir apparent? The Patek Philippe PR team wouldn’t say. But according to online reports, Adrien, now in his early 20s, has begun training at the company, so it’s not implausible.
Adrien’s great-great-grandfather, Charles Stern, bought Patek Philippe in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression (together with his brother, Jean), then handed it down, like one of the brand’s eternal timepieces, to his son, Henri, who passed it down to his son, Philippe, who did the same for his son, Thierry. By all accounts, the brand’s future as one of the Swiss industry’s last-remaining family-owned watch firms will proceed uninterrupted, at least for a fifth generation.
