Messages: 3405 Location: Germany and USA
Registered: April 2007
The new Journe
Mon, 10 December 2012 03:23
So I guess it was not a big mystery what the new watch might be!
I have been obsessed with the Tourbillon Souverain ever since this post of almost four years ago hit me like a ton of bricks:
http://forums.timezone.com/index.php?t=tree&goto=4258561&rid=0
At that time I thought it would be impossible that I would ever acquire one but I made it a point to "visit" Tourbillons whenever my travel took me to a place with a Journe dealership or boutique (Germany has neither!). Every time, the impact the watch made on me is best described as visceral - it jolts me. So much has been written about it but more than other watches you actually have to see it to appreciate how beautiful the Tourbillon is, and how great the juxtaposition of the continuous movement of the cage and the dead seconds. The watch is both sublime, and, on an "Olympian" level, a bit of a practical joke: hidden by your sleeve, you can read the time discreetly (a pleasure of many Journe dials), pull the sleeve back a bit, is it a digital watch? - Pull it back more, no, wait, it is a Tourbillon. Your mileage may vary, and granted that the signature piece of Journe is the Resonance, this is THE WATCH for me.
Two things I debated back and forth is the dial and the size. Dial, I prefer Platinum cases but I also find the RG/RG dial very alluring. My favorite combination currently is the PT/WG dial that I also have on my Resonance, but I also love the old YG dials (which you cannot have for the Tourbillon Souverain a Seconde Morte I think) and the Black Label dial is nice as well. So I am Catholic there. It ended up being WG dial; I am struck by how different it seems to my Resonance WG dial; it seems more textured and varies more with the play of light during the day, lovely effects. Perhaps it is the deep opening of the tourbillon cage that does that.
Size, here I have changed my mind over time. I started out preferring the 40mm size, more contemporary as it is, but then liked the 38mm more and more. On the CS I find the larger size overpowering now; I sold my 40mm and rebought it in 38mm. For the Souverain Watches with small subdials I think both look great; the 40mm look mellow and happily married and the 38mm more lean and edgy. While the 40mm would therefore fit me better the 38mm is what attracted me a tad more, and if you look at the old Tourbillon models, especially the prototypes, I think it is clear that Journe conceived the watch with narrow bezel.
So in sum I am very glad I can now take care of a 39mm WG dial/PT case. I met a very nice fellow watch collector who treated me to a wonderful lunch and some amazing stories about the watch world on Saturday. Then I took the watch to see some great ancestors at the British museum (that is a Tompion regulator in the background)
And here it is now, another shot in the London evening sun:
Surprisingly I managed to not cause an accident either on my way back or today in the German snow and sleet, although I do not remember taking my eye off the dial!
- donizetti