Romain Gauthier began his professional life as a micro-mechanical engineer, but he could not deny that watchmaking was in his blood, as both of his parents had worked for manufactures such as Audemars Piguet, Lemania, and Dubois Dépraz. He launched his watch brand in 2005 with the Prestige HM, which was well-received by collectors. Indeed, no less than Philippe Dufour himself inspired Gauthier not only to establish his own brand (rather than a single timepiece), but encouraged him to push the envelope of craftsmanship. Gauthier’s Logical One, presented in 2013 (winning the Men’s prize for Best Complication the same year at the Geneva Watchmaking Grand Prix) is a true feat of mechanical engineering, watchmaking and movement finish.

The Logical One Logical features a quadruple patented flat chain-and-fusée style constant force system with ruby chain links. Gautier’s goal was to create a constant force mechanism (one that transmits energy evenly from the mainspring regardless of the state of wind of the watch). Gautier further enhanced the traditional fusée/chain mechanism by replacing the fusée with a slowly rotating snail cam, which is situated at 10 o’clock to the left of the hour/minutes dial. As the snail cam and mainspring barrel are on the same level, the force is always transmitted in a straight line and, as only one short line of chain is needed, the links can be bigger and stronger. The watch also features a very original winding mechanism in the form of a push button on the left side of the case. A power reserve indicator on the back completes the features. The watch’s spectacular movement decoration includes hand-polished bevels, hand-frosting, snailing, straight-graining and circular-graining, as well as hand-polished jewel countersinks.

The present Logical One in platinum is part of a limited edition of 20 pieces made with black enamel dial. Gauthier chose not to include numbers 4 and 14 and as such created examples bearing numbers 00 (the present watch) and 21. However, the present piece is also the only one with a Roman numeral dial as opposed to the others with Arabic numeral, interestingly enough the owner reached out to Gauthier pointing out to the fact that his name was Romain but he never used the eponymous numerals (in French Romain is pronounced Roman) and Gauthier accepted to make him a special example featuring Roman numerals.