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WatchesAug 11, 2016
Patek Philippe’s $2.6M, 175th anniversary watch
Patek Philippe has unveiled its most complicated and expensive wristwatch to date, the Grandmaster Chime. With six new watchmaking patents and 20 complications, the limited-edition timepiece has a $2.6 million price tag.
The 18-karat gold wristwatch costs $2.6 million, and features six new watchmaking patents and 20 complications, among them a leap-year cycle, moon phase and second time zone.
It also has two faces: one that that focuses on the time and sonnerie. The other is dedicated to the full, instantaneous perpetual calendar. Changing the face is “simple,” Patek Philippe said, due to a reversing mechanism in the lugs.
Some of the 47 mm watch’s other complications include a grande and petite sonnerie, minute-repeater, a four-digit year display, movement power-reserve indicator and two chimes: an acoustic alarm that strikes the alarm time, and a date-repeater that sounds the date on demand.
“The ultimate in user-friendliness and safety is assured with intelligent mechanisms that prevent potentially damaging manipulations and thus reliably protect the highly complex movement with its intricate cosmos of tiny parts,” the brand said.
Design-wise, the timepiece has an 18-karat rose gold case with sapphire crystals on both sides and a laurel wreath motif on the bezel.
Patek Philippe made only seven Grandmaster Chime watches. It will sell six to long-standing collectors while the seventh will be housed at the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva.
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