Our final live auction of the spring 2026 season, The Phillips New York Watch Auction: XIV, takes place on 13–14 June at our Manhattan headquarters, bringing together more than 150 exceptional watches in a carefully curated sale. Ahead of the auction, we’ll be highlighting some of its most compelling timepieces and stories, including the lots featured in this article.
By Steven Rogers
Over the past two and a half decades, it is fair to say Kari Voutilainen has carved out an extraordinary place within contemporary watchmaking.
The Finnish-born independent has claimed no fewer than 12 Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève awards, built some of the most respected ateliers in Switzerland, and become a reference point for collectors drawn to classically styled timepieces, fine hand-finishing, and exceptional engine-turned dials.
Since establishing his first workshop in Val-de-Travers in 2002, the AHCI stalwart has gradually expanded beyond the traditional image of the lone independent craftsman at a bench.
Nowadays, his orbit includes the Comblémine dial manufacture, Brodbeck Guillochage, the Voutilainen & Cattin case factory, collaborations with the likes of Louis Vuitton, and a central role in the revival of Urban Jürgensen.
Phillips, too, has worked alongside him on the acclaimed Zenith Calibre 135-O project.
High Quality, Low Volume
Yet despite that growth, Voutilainen’s watches remain ultra-high quality and extremely low volume, with his Môtiers manufacture still producing fewer than 60 pieces per year.
And demand for them is such that earlier this year, the brand confirmed that it had stopped taking new orders in an effort to reduce waiting times that had stretched beyond a decade.
Even with production reorganized, acquiring one of his watches remains a long-term proposition.
For collectors, then, the quartet of discontinued Voutilainen watches heading to Phillips’ New York Watch Auction: XIV offers something increasingly difficult to find – immediate access to four different expressions of one of contemporary watchmaking’s most impressive voices.
Ahead of the sale, Voutilainen spoke with Phillips about these watches, reflecting on how each one traces a key milestone in the watchmaker’s career.
Learning His Craft
Long before collectors associated Kari Voutilainen with his sector-adjacent hand-guilloché dials, teardrop case lugs, and oversized balance wheels, he was restoring some of the most technically demanding watches ever made.
After studying at the Finnish School of Watchmaking, he moved to Switzerland to continue his training at WOSTEP before joining Parmigiani Fleurier’s restoration department in the early 1990s, where pocket chronometers, minute repeaters, and tourbillons regularly passed across his bench.
That period proved formative. Alongside restoration work, the Rovaniemi native began developing increasingly ambitious personal projects, including a one-minute tourbillon pocket watch completed in 1994 and a minute repeater commission a few years later.
By the end of the decade, he had returned to WOSTEP as a teacher while developing prototypes and complications behind the scenes, including work for Urban Jürgensen under Peter Baumberger.
Breaking Out on His Own
When he established his own workshop in 2002, Voutilainen was already producing highly complicated watches, including decimal repeaters. At the same time, chronographs were beginning to occupy a central place in his thinking.
“I had previously worked on chronographs, doing monopushers and split-second chronographs,” recalls Voutilainen.
“But chronographs are underestimated. They are actually difficult to do because they have to be smooth to use. When you launch it, it must work nicely and then when it resets, everything around the column wheel has to function perfectly.”
That interest eventually led to the Masterpiece Chronograph, one of Voutilainen’s earliest small-series watches and notable for the fact that he manufactured most of the movement components in-house.
Masterpiece Chronograph II
Later, this chronograph concept evolved into the Masterpiece Chronograph II project, a collaborative series developed with a Northern California collectors’ group that began in 2010.
Limited to 10 watches, the project introduced a crown-adjusted oversized date and moonphase, requiring substantial reworking of the movement, while each watch was distinguished by unique dial treatments and case materials chosen by the collectors.
“It was a rewarding project to undertake, but challenging nevertheless,” says Voutilainen.
“The big date required a lot of reflection on how best to implement it. We operate the functions by pressing the crown and, on paper, it worked, but once we began developing it further, we discovered there were many refinements to be made. But we got there in the end.”
Birth of the Observatoire
By the mid-2000s, collectors had begun asking Voutilainen for something simpler and more accessible than the complicated bespoke pieces leaving his workshop at the time.
“There were customers asking if I could do something more affordable instead of, say, minute repeaters,” Voutilainen recalls. “So that was the starting point for a different type of watch.”
The result was the Observatoire, a timepiece that would become one of the defining models of his career.
Produced in a series of roughly 50 pieces and featuring intricate hand-guilloché gold dials with applied numerals, it was built around new-old-stock Peseux 260 movements originally intended for observatory chronometry competitions during the mid-20th century.
Award-Winner
Rather than simply restoring the calibers, Voutilainen extensively reworked them for modern wristwatch use, replacing key components of the regulating organ while adapting the movement for everyday reliability.
“The original movements didn’t have shock protection, for example, because they were made for observatory competitions,” Voutilainen explains. “So, we had to redesign certain things to make it suitable for daily use.”
He also elevated the finishing to his own exacting standards. The project proved pivotal: the Observatoire would go on to win the Men’s Watch Prize at the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève in 2007, his first such accolade, helping establish him among the leading names in independent watchmaking.
Natural Progression
If the Observatoire had shown what could be achieved using historically important ébauches, the next step was to create a caliber that was entirely his own. Enter caliber 28 and the Vingt-8 collection.
“Even from the beginning, I realized that we must make our own movement to pave the way for our future,” says Voutilainen. “I also wanted to guarantee after-sales service for customers. But my thinking was that the movement had to be a bit special.”
At the center of the caliber 28 was Voutilainen’s interpretation of the natural escapement, a system using two escape wheels to deliver direct impulses to a sizeable balance wheel while reducing friction compared to a traditional Swiss lever escapement.
The idea partly stemmed from restoration work carried out decades earlier.
“I was lucky enough to work on a Breguet tourbillon pocket watch with natural escapement in the ’90s,” he recalls. “I thought that we must try this kind of escapement. We couldn’t use the escapement exactly as Breguet imagined it, but the principle is the same.”
Offbeat But Poetic
Over time, the Vingt-8 would evolve into a broad family of watches incorporating GMT indications, retrograde displays, sports models, and more experimental executions such as the Vingt-8 ISO.
At first glance, the Vingt-8 ISO remains unmistakably Voutilainen – white gold round case, hand-guilloché dial, and the familiar open-tipped pomme hands. Its approach to displaying time, however, is entirely unconventional.
“The idea came to do something new,” Voutilainen says. “Perhaps we should treat time differently.”
Influenced in part by psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman’s theories on intuitive and analytical thinking, the ISO was conceived to make the wearer engage with time in an alternative fashion.
Instead of relying on a traditional fixed minute track, the watch uses a rotating chapter ring that constantly changes the relationship between the hands and the dial itself.
“I was thinking in a philosophical way, that we should really ‘read’ the time,” he says. “People have experimented with time displays in different ways, digitally and so forth, so I thought why not try it this new way.”
He adds: “It’s also poetic that every full hour you have the hands on top of each other, every half hour you have the hands at 180 degrees, and then every quarter they are at 90 degrees. Technically, though, it is quite a challenge to achieve this.”
Indeed, the rotating display required a newly configured movement that was slightly thicker than the standard Caliber 28.
Turning Things Around
For years, collectors had come to associate Kari Voutilainen, in the main, with solid guilloché dials. But the Vingt-8 Inversé, first revealed in 2019, shifted that balance dramatically by bringing much of the movement itself onto the dial side.
“There are many reasons I did this,” Voutilainen says. “But the main one is that I didn’t want to be a victim of having just one type of design. I wanted to have another kind of dial.”
The challenge was not simply aesthetic. Reversing the architecture of the caliber 28 required reworking the movement while preserving the legibility and balance that had long characterized Voutilainen’s watches.
The result placed the oversized balance wheel, its mirror-polished bridge, the escapement and gear train prominently on display, transforming the watch into something far more architectural.
Full of Life
Voutilainen admits that he was not entirely convinced by the concept at first.
“When we were doing the construction and making the drawings and renderings, I had a bit of difficulty believing this was the right design choice,” he recalls. “But when you see the watch in the flesh, you get this three-dimensional feel. There’s a depth and a life inside it.”
That sense of depth is particularly apparent in the platinum Vingt-8 Inversé offered in New York, one of just eight examples produced in the metal.
Joining it in the sale are the 18k white gold Masterpiece Chronograph II “Number 1 of 10” with light silvered guilloché dial, a white gold Observatoire featuring dark silvered dial, and the offbeat Vingt-8 ISO, also in white gold, with light silvered guilloché dial and red minute track.
You can learn more about these timepieces, place a bid, and view the entire Phillips New York Watch Auction: XIV catalogue 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 DECADE ONE (2015–2025) sale having realized $83 million in 2025. The annual total for watch auctions in 2025 exceeded $290 million, marking the first time any auction house's Watches department has surpassed US$200 million in annual sales for five consecutive years.
About Steven Rogers
Steven Rogers is Senior Editorial Manager at Phillips in Association with Bacs & Russo, with 15 years’ experience in the Swiss watch industry as an editor, copywriter, and communications manager across brands, agencies, and media.