Our final live auction of 2023, the PHILLIPS New York Watch Auction: NINE, takes place on December 9 and 10, at our New York headquarters on Park Avenue. The auction includes more than 150 of the world's finest watches – including the lovely Kari Voutilainen Observatoire featured below.
– By Logan Baker
Kari Voutilainen, 61, is considered an elder statesman of today's independent watchmaking circuit. He owns a dialmaker (Comblémine), a casemaker (Cattin), and is leading a revival at Urban Jürgensen, the cult-favorite brand he acquired with a group of investors in November 2021. And none of those roles even include what's earned him a total of nine GPHG awards (and counting), which is creating unique watches under his own name.
It’s clear that Voutilainen is no longer just a watchmaker. He’s building a bona fide horological empire from his headquarters in Môtiers, Switzerland. But things weren’t always this smooth sailing. You don’t have to go back too far in history, in fact, to revisit the Observatoire, the first run of watches that Voutilainen produced in series, rather than as one-off unique pieces.
When Voutilainen launched his business in 2002, after a productive nine-year stint at Parmigiani Fleurier, he initially focused exclusively on highly complicated wristwatches, such as his famous decimal repeater, that varied widely in style and execution, primarily based on the whims and desires of his initial clientele.
It wasn’t until 2007, with the release of the Observatoire wristwatch, that the Voutilainen design language we now know so well was firmly established. You know the details I’m talking about – a perfectly round case cheekily interrupted by soldered teardrop lugs, sector-adjacent dials with intricate guilloché and applied numerals, Observatory-style hands, and beautiful manual-wind hand-finished movements with large, leisurely ticking balance wheels.
The Observatoire was an instant hit among collectors and industry pundits, bringing home the Men’s Watch Prize in the 2007 GPHG, Voutilainen’s first big award. In fact, it was such a success that demand for it quickly exceeded Voutilainen’s original plans of a single-digit production run. It’s now believed approximately 50 different examples were produced over a four-year period, before it was officially replaced in 2011 by the Vingt-8, which featured a similar design but came with Voutilainen’s new in-house caliber 28.
Although the Observatoire is regarded as the first watch from Voutilainen to enter “serial” production, it’s worth noting that there was no cookie cutter assembly line process taking place. Each of the approximately 50 pieces is unique in some fashion. You could choose between at least five different case metals (steel, platinum, yellow gold, white gold, and pink gold), two different case diameters (38mm and 40mm), as well as countless different dial colors, guilloché patterns, and movement finishes.
The variety is so large that a small group of collectors on WatchProSite (formerly, The PuristsPro) even valiantly attempted to document all of the different variants in existence.
Despite all the possible configurations that are out there, a few details remained consistent throughout the series, including the overall case and dial format, and more importantly, the movement. Unlike the in-house caliber in the Vingt-8, the Observatoire models featured a vintage “new-old-stock" Observatory-grade Peseux 260 ébauche movement that had previously never been used in a wristwatch.
The Peseux 260 was originally developed in the 1950s, primarily to compete in precision timekeeping trials such as those hosted at the Geneva and Neuchâtel Observatories. It never entered regular production, used solely by competing watchmakers as a starting ébauche to adjust and build around. It’s believed that no more than 3,300 movement blanks were ever built. One of Voutilainen’s clients actually approached him one day with a small assortment of vintage Peseux calibers, and the suggestion of using one of them in his next watch.
Voutilainen immediately knew he had to give these historic movements a second life.
Voutilainen had already worked with vintage ébauche movements under his own label by that point (his early decimal repeaters were based on either a vintage Jaeger-LeCoultre or Louis Audemars caliber), so this wasn't necessarily unusual territory, but at the same time, Voutilainen had yet to approach a project under his own name with as large of a production footprint as the Observatoire series would have.
The manual-wind Peseux 260 has a 30mm diameter and 5mm height and runs in 21 jewels, at typically – more on this in a moment – a beat rate of 18,000 vph. Voutilainen made some pretty drastic changes to the movement’s regulating organ, discarding it entirely and swapping it out for his own custom free-sprung balance wheel, hairspring, and escapement. It was in the Observatoire series that Voutilainen first introduced his intricate balance spring architecture that utilizes a Phillips overcoil and interior Grossmann curve for a more consistent distribution of tension between the overcoil and inner curve. Voutilainen is regarded as the first watchmaker in the 21st century to use this design.
Every Voutilainen Observatoire is unique in some fashion, but some are more unique than others. One example that sold at Phillips recently during the May 2023 Geneva Watch Auction: XVII wasthe only known Observatoire with a high-beat movement that ran at 5 Hz, twice as fast as the standard Peseux 260.
The great thing about this era of Voutilainen timepieces is that it is almost a certainty that Voutilainen himself was the original person in charge of assembling, adjusting, and regulating each and every watch. For example, it’s been said it would take Voutilainen a whole day back then to complete the shaping and decoration of a single hand used on the Observatoire – yup, one hand, not two. And when you're running multiple different businesses at once, nobody has time one-hand-a-day time anymore.
Thankfully, Voutilainen has a great and experienced team around him at Comblémine and Cattin that is able to support his goals and increase the scale of his work without sacrificing any of the elements that made watches like the Observatoire series so exceptional.
You can learn more, register a bid, and view the entire New York Watch Auction: NINE catalog right here
About Phillips In Association With Bacs & Russo
The team of specialists at PHILLIPS Watches is dedicated to an uncompromised approach to quality, transparency, and client service. Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo holds the world record for the most successful watch auction, with its Geneva Watch Auction: XIV having realized $74.5 million in 2021. Over the course of 2021 and 2022, the company sold 100% of the watches offered, a first in the industry, resulting in the highest annual total in history across all the auction houses at $227 million.
About Logan Baker
Logan has spent the past decade working in watch-focused media, reporting on every aspect of the industry. He joined Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo at the start of 2023 as the department's Senior Editorial Manager. He splits his time between New York and Geneva.
Recommended Reading
Specialists' Picks: The New York Watch Auction: NINE
Kari Voutilainen: Master of Dials
Naissance d’une Montre II: Making A Watch By Hand in the 21st Century