We continue to highlight a few of our favorite watches from among the more than sixty watchmakers that have created timepieces for the Only Watch charity auction, which commences Sunday, November 5, in Geneva. Christie’s will auction these incredible one-of-a-kind watches to raise funds that benefit research in the battle against Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.
While you may have seen a few of the watches set for auction earlier this year when Only Watch announced them, we thought you’d enjoy seeing many of these impressive designs again just ahead of the event.
The watches are currently touring the globe. After concluding their U.S. visit at Christie’s in New York on September 17, the tour will visit Monaco next, followed by stops in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Dubai and back in Geneva. See the Only Watch website for tour dates and details. 
In this post we highlight the Tourbillon Planétarium Only Watch 2023 from Frederique Constant, which has teamed with independent watchmaker extraordinaire Christiaan van der Klaauw. His planetarium watch, the smallest in the world and the only one produced in recent history for a wristwatch (the Ulysse Nardin Planetarium from 1990 was the first) and is melded with an in-house Frederique Constant tourbillon. Both appear within a glittering aventurine dial.
The hand-finished piece is housed in a 42mm platinum case.
The watch boasts several premieres. It’s the first Frederique Constant Manufacture Tourbillon to share a watch with a planetarium and also the first Christiaan van der Klaauw piece of this type to feature a tourbillon. It’s also the first time that a Manufacture Frederique Constant timepiece has had an aventurine dial or a 42mm platinum case. It’s also the first time that a Frederique Constant watch has included a combined month and date display using hands on a single counter.
The watch’s heliocentric system brings together six moving discs in the same plane, each with its own planet completing its orbit around the sun in real time: Mercury (88 days), Venus (225 days), Earth (365 days), Mars (687 days), Jupiter (12 years) and Saturn (29 years). The wearer will have to wait almost thirty years to see Saturn, the outermost planet in this system, complete a full orbit. Around this, shooting stars and planets appear, with the colors of the planets pictured using the Only Watch 2023 palette.
Estimate: CHF 90,000 – 110,000.
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