How to collect Patek Philippe: an insider's guide
www.gq-magazine.co.uk
Watches are arguably the perfect collectible: they satisfy the same urge to understand mechanical things that characterises car collecting, but they don’t require a cavernous garage; they have all the aesthetic variety of a collection of paintings but you don’t need the wall space; they brim with the sort of forensically tiny differentiating details that raise philatelists to boundless ecstasies but are not as geeky as stamps; and they have the element of personal ornament valued by collectors of vintage couture, Hermès handbags and jewellery.
The appeal of watch collecting is easy enough to comprehend. Why Patek Philippe occupies the position it does is less immediately apparent. There are older brands – its near neighbour Vacheron Constantin, for instance, has been around since 1755, 84 years longer than Patek. Even though Patek Philippe’s cofounder Jean Adrien Philippe was no horological slouch and is famed for his development of keyless winding, Abraham-Louis Breguet was more dazzlingly horologically inventive. In terms of ruggedness, Rolex was the first watch on top of Everest, through the sound barrier and to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Nor is Patek the most recondite of brands: off the top of my head I can name a dozen small-volume producers – flavour-of-the-month independents – whose annual production may not even make it into three figures.
Instead, I believe that Patek’s greatness lies in the fact that it is first and foremost a maker of watches – as distinct from items of fashion or status conferral that happen to tell the time. Sometimes the finger of fashion will point out a favourite. Unless you have been in a coma for the last three or four years, you will know that the Gérald Genta-designed Patek Philippe Nautilus is about as hot as hell with the heating turned right up. But Patek values balance, rather than listening too closely to the siren song of easy money. It is not, therefore, known primarily for one type of timepiece – aviators’ watches, say, or diving watches or chronographs. Instead it is active and successful in all the traditional horological sectors: simple time-only watches, complications, grand complications, steel sports watches, women’s watches, jewellery watches, even table clocks.
Here's our beginner's dial to collecting these remarkable objects…
What to buy
Here's what we recommend for every level of budget…
1. Under £5,000
An early 20th-century pocket watch in average condition.
2. Under £10,000
“Shaped” case watches from the 1970s – typically smaller size, manually wound Ellipses. Manual Calatravas from the 1980s and 1990s also represent great value. For period chic go for the hobnail bezel ref 3919. “Every collection needs a 3919,” says John Reardon of collectability.com. “Quintessential Patek.”
3. Under £20,000
Take your pick of self-winding Calatravas (classic examples include refs 5107, 5117 and 5115). At around £20,000 you can start picking up exotics, such as the tonneau-shaped, platinum-cased guilloche dial Gondolo ref 5098 or early examples of the classic annual calendar ref 5035.
4. £35,000 to £45,000
This should get you a perpetual calendar, one of the noblest complications (either a classic 3940 or the slightly less well known, retrograde date ref 5050 or ref 5059). Alternatively, you can enter the foothills of Aquanaut pricing.
5. £50,000
A jumbo-sized steel Nautilus (once the hype has quietened down) or maybe a recent precious-metal Aquanaut, such as the drop-dead gorgeous white gold ref 5168G. A less predictable buy would be a 1950s ref 2526 Calatrava, launched in 1953 and powered by Patek’s first self-winding calibre (the 12-600 AT). In modern production, this sort of cash will get you the recently discontinued ref 5170 chronograph.
6. £65,000
The hallowed territory of the perpetual calendar chronograph, the classic Patek Philippe complication combo. At this sort of price you can expect a reasonable third series made during the 1990s and early 2000s.
7. £100,000 to £200,000
This is 5970 perpetual calendar chronograph country. Consider yourself to have arrived. In many eyes, it’s the most harmoniously designed Patek Philippe of the last 15 years. As fewer 2499s and 1518s come to market, collectors will gravitate towards this masterpiece.
Sleeper hits
Time the market and invest in these Pateks while they are less in demand…
From left: Annual calendar chronograph ref 5960
Can’t afford a 5970? Give this less famous alternative a look. Prices for steel on bracelet or gold on strap start at around £40,000.
Neptune ref 5080
A short-lived sports-dress crossover model that offers a quirky alternative to a Nautilus for £10,000 upwards.
Ref 3633
A 1970s-style dress watch that combines the current trend for hardstone dials (such as onyx) with period styling. Available on a leather strap but try to buy on the gold bracelet. Expect to pay £6,000 or more.
Ellipse ref 3738
A classic Patek piece that’s beginning to enjoy a reappraisal. Some of the smaller case sizes are still available from £6,000.
Collector tips
A tick list for experienced and first-time Patek buyers alike…
Get a Patek whisperer (and keep him close). Former Christie’s boss John Reardon, known informally as the Patek Professor, is one of the best. He founded the online Patek specialist collectability.com. The other sensible course of action is to make friends with your local Patek-authorised dealer.
Buy the best condition you can. You will pay more, but so will the person who buys it from you. The perfect Patek will be barely worn, never polished, fresh to market and come with its original box, certificate of origin and retailer receipt. For every one of those things that is missing the price decreases (you get about ten per cent less for a watch that comes without its original certificate).
At the very least, make sure that the watch comes with an extract from the archives. This will not guarantee anything about the watch, but it will inform you of the spec when it left the factory (dial colour, strap or bracelet and any other distinguishing characteristics). If the watch you are offered differs from its extract description: caveat emptor.
Look out for unusual characteristics. A cosigned dial increases the price dramatically. Patek used to let privileged retailers put their name on the dial. Tiffany still continues to do this. Great European names include Beyer of Zurich, Asprey, Gobbi of Milan and Hausmann of Rome. Similarly, expect the price to take off like a rocket if there is lofty provenance (particularly anything touched by Eric Clapton, one of the most significant collectors of Patek ever). Unusual metals and dial design – even a small thing such as a telemetric scale replacing a more usual tachymeter or Arabic as opposed to baton indices – can spark a bidding war.
What makes Patek Philippe so collectible?
To answer this question, you have to understand Patek Philippe's history. Over the last 180 odd years, the brand has learned the lesson of consistency. The firm was founded in 1839 by Polish émigré Antoni Norbert Patek. After a false start with a fellow Pole, Franciszek Czapek, he went into business with Philippe, a rising young watchmaker. During the 19th century, a Patek Philippe became the dernier cri in royal courts. Queen Victoria bought one for herself and another for her husband. In 1897, King Rama V of Siam purchased no fewer than 56 watches, all destined for use by the royal family. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Tsar tried to entrust Patek Philippe with manufacture of all watches for his court, a commission that the company, with regret, was obliged to decline as it was already flooded with orders... many from the New World.
From Tennessee (distiller Jasper Newton of Jack Daniel’s was a Patek man) to Wall Street, the plutocrats of Gilded Age America regarded possession of a complicated Patek Philippe watch as one of the axioms of success. And by the early 1930s, Patek had cemented its reputation as the king of complications with the creation of the Graves Supercomplication (below), a massive multifunction pocket watch for New York banker Henry Graves. It surfaces in the world’s watch auction rooms from time to time, most recently fetching a little over £15.3 million in 2014. And there the Patek Philippe story might have ended. The Great Depression and Patek’s exposure to a bad debtor would have killed the firm had it not been for a consortium of investors headed by the Stern family.
And it is with the Stern family that the story of modern Patek and its march to 21st-century greatness begins. Just as the advertising encourages us to pass our Pateks on to the next generation, so the Sterns pass the entire firm down the generations. Above all, Patek is consistent and, as with thoroughbred racehorses, there are distinct Patek Philippe bloodlines. In the Dauphine hands and applied baton numerals of today’s Calatrava ref 5196, it is easy to discern the lineaments of its art deco ancestor ref 96. And today’s perpetual calendar chronograph, the 5270, can be traced back through the 5970, 3970 and 2499 to the 1518, the first ever series-produced perpetual calendar chrono wristwatch, production of which began in 1941.
The Sterns take their stewardship of Patek Philippe seriously. As they own the company, they have no shareholders cracking the financial whip for increased quarterly growth and higher dividends. And because they run the company (Thierry Stern is the incumbent president, but his father, Philippe, is still to be seen at the factory and one of his sons is an apprentice), it is preserved from the egotistical excesses of a salaried manager who wants to leave his or her mark on the brand. Moreover, when it comes to watches, Thierry really knows what he is talking about – he has designed many of them personally, among them the modern “grail” perpetual calendar chronograph, the 5970, the 5320 perpetual calendar and the celebrated and initially controversial Pilot.
Instead of the reactive ruthlessness of short-term marketing goals, the family can take the long view: when the rest of the industry was rushing headlong into the manufacture of electronic watches in the 1970s and early 1980s, Patek continued to make the best-quality mechanical watches. Indeed, one of its most celebrated movements, the Calibre 240 (pictured) with the 22-carat gold micro rotor, a true micro-mechanical masterpiece, made its debut at the nadir of the so-called quartz crisis in 1977. Similarly, the Nautilus 5711/1A-010 has long been part of the uniform of the super-rich, and Patek could have chosen to sell these by the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Instead, it discontinued the reference, because it fears that overdependence on one model would impair the long term health of the company.
It is this independence, allied to a stubborn belief in what it does, that accounts for Patek maintaining production of certain models because they are key to the Patek story rather than because they account for a huge proportion of sales.
For instance, in the early 1990s Patek could have quietly ceased production of the Golden Ellipse. Launched in 1968 with a dial of blue gold, it is neither oval nor straight-sided but somewhere enigmatically in between. During the 1960s, advances in mass production meant that cheaply produced watches were able to imitate the appearance of luxury timepieces with ever greater facility and therefore a design was sought that would, at a glance, be distinguishable from the common run of watches The design of the Golden Ellipse was of such superb simplicity that it soon became Patek Philippe’s most readily identifiable timepiece. It was such a success that by the late 1970s, 65 different models of Ellipse were in production. Moreover, there were Ellipse lighters, Ellipse cufflinks, Ellipse rings and even Ellipse astrological pendants. Inevitably, the Ellipse trend went the way of large astrological pendants – and a less horologically sensitive owner would have discontinued the line. But Thierry Stern kept it in the collection because it was an important part of Patek history, it being a watch introduced by his grandfather.
That is the point of collecting Patek. By wearing one you feel part of the ongoing narrative. And it need not be the financially crippling exercise that the £25.7m paid for a Grandmaster Chime at a charity auction in Geneva in 2019 might suggest.
Still, be warned. Patek Philippe is habit forming and many great collectors are like addicts: they can’t help themselves. Indeed, like many less benign intoxicants, a correctly chosen Patek Philippe raises the spirits, soothes the nerves, knits up the ravelled sleeve of care and all that... and the best bit is it can last forever. Patek undertakes to repair any watch it has ever made. As the advertising has been at pains to inform us for years, once we no longer have use for one, we pass it on to the next generation.
www.gq-magazine.co.uk
Watches are arguably the perfect collectible: they satisfy the same urge to understand mechanical things that characterises car collecting, but they don’t require a cavernous garage; they have all the aesthetic variety of a collection of paintings but you don’t need the wall space; they brim with the sort of forensically tiny differentiating details that raise philatelists to boundless ecstasies but are not as geeky as stamps; and they have the element of personal ornament valued by collectors of vintage couture, Hermès handbags and jewellery.
The appeal of watch collecting is easy enough to comprehend. Why Patek Philippe occupies the position it does is less immediately apparent. There are older brands – its near neighbour Vacheron Constantin, for instance, has been around since 1755, 84 years longer than Patek. Even though Patek Philippe’s cofounder Jean Adrien Philippe was no horological slouch and is famed for his development of keyless winding, Abraham-Louis Breguet was more dazzlingly horologically inventive. In terms of ruggedness, Rolex was the first watch on top of Everest, through the sound barrier and to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Nor is Patek the most recondite of brands: off the top of my head I can name a dozen small-volume producers – flavour-of-the-month independents – whose annual production may not even make it into three figures.
Instead, I believe that Patek’s greatness lies in the fact that it is first and foremost a maker of watches – as distinct from items of fashion or status conferral that happen to tell the time. Sometimes the finger of fashion will point out a favourite. Unless you have been in a coma for the last three or four years, you will know that the Gérald Genta-designed Patek Philippe Nautilus is about as hot as hell with the heating turned right up. But Patek values balance, rather than listening too closely to the siren song of easy money. It is not, therefore, known primarily for one type of timepiece – aviators’ watches, say, or diving watches or chronographs. Instead it is active and successful in all the traditional horological sectors: simple time-only watches, complications, grand complications, steel sports watches, women’s watches, jewellery watches, even table clocks.
Here's our beginner's dial to collecting these remarkable objects…
What to buy
Here's what we recommend for every level of budget…
1. Under £5,000
An early 20th-century pocket watch in average condition.
“Shaped” case watches from the 1970s – typically smaller size, manually wound Ellipses. Manual Calatravas from the 1980s and 1990s also represent great value. For period chic go for the hobnail bezel ref 3919. “Every collection needs a 3919,” says John Reardon of collectability.com. “Quintessential Patek.”
Take your pick of self-winding Calatravas (classic examples include refs 5107, 5117 and 5115). At around £20,000 you can start picking up exotics, such as the tonneau-shaped, platinum-cased guilloche dial Gondolo ref 5098 or early examples of the classic annual calendar ref 5035.
This should get you a perpetual calendar, one of the noblest complications (either a classic 3940 or the slightly less well known, retrograde date ref 5050 or ref 5059). Alternatively, you can enter the foothills of Aquanaut pricing.
A jumbo-sized steel Nautilus (once the hype has quietened down) or maybe a recent precious-metal Aquanaut, such as the drop-dead gorgeous white gold ref 5168G. A less predictable buy would be a 1950s ref 2526 Calatrava, launched in 1953 and powered by Patek’s first self-winding calibre (the 12-600 AT). In modern production, this sort of cash will get you the recently discontinued ref 5170 chronograph.
The hallowed territory of the perpetual calendar chronograph, the classic Patek Philippe complication combo. At this sort of price you can expect a reasonable third series made during the 1990s and early 2000s.
7. £100,000 to £200,000
This is 5970 perpetual calendar chronograph country. Consider yourself to have arrived. In many eyes, it’s the most harmoniously designed Patek Philippe of the last 15 years. As fewer 2499s and 1518s come to market, collectors will gravitate towards this masterpiece.
Sleeper hits
Time the market and invest in these Pateks while they are less in demand…
From left: Annual calendar chronograph ref 5960
Can’t afford a 5970? Give this less famous alternative a look. Prices for steel on bracelet or gold on strap start at around £40,000.
Neptune ref 5080
A short-lived sports-dress crossover model that offers a quirky alternative to a Nautilus for £10,000 upwards.
Ref 3633
A 1970s-style dress watch that combines the current trend for hardstone dials (such as onyx) with period styling. Available on a leather strap but try to buy on the gold bracelet. Expect to pay £6,000 or more.
Ellipse ref 3738
A classic Patek piece that’s beginning to enjoy a reappraisal. Some of the smaller case sizes are still available from £6,000.
Collector tips
A tick list for experienced and first-time Patek buyers alike…
Get a Patek whisperer (and keep him close). Former Christie’s boss John Reardon, known informally as the Patek Professor, is one of the best. He founded the online Patek specialist collectability.com. The other sensible course of action is to make friends with your local Patek-authorised dealer.
Buy the best condition you can. You will pay more, but so will the person who buys it from you. The perfect Patek will be barely worn, never polished, fresh to market and come with its original box, certificate of origin and retailer receipt. For every one of those things that is missing the price decreases (you get about ten per cent less for a watch that comes without its original certificate).
At the very least, make sure that the watch comes with an extract from the archives. This will not guarantee anything about the watch, but it will inform you of the spec when it left the factory (dial colour, strap or bracelet and any other distinguishing characteristics). If the watch you are offered differs from its extract description: caveat emptor.
Look out for unusual characteristics. A cosigned dial increases the price dramatically. Patek used to let privileged retailers put their name on the dial. Tiffany still continues to do this. Great European names include Beyer of Zurich, Asprey, Gobbi of Milan and Hausmann of Rome. Similarly, expect the price to take off like a rocket if there is lofty provenance (particularly anything touched by Eric Clapton, one of the most significant collectors of Patek ever). Unusual metals and dial design – even a small thing such as a telemetric scale replacing a more usual tachymeter or Arabic as opposed to baton indices – can spark a bidding war.
What makes Patek Philippe so collectible?
To answer this question, you have to understand Patek Philippe's history. Over the last 180 odd years, the brand has learned the lesson of consistency. The firm was founded in 1839 by Polish émigré Antoni Norbert Patek. After a false start with a fellow Pole, Franciszek Czapek, he went into business with Philippe, a rising young watchmaker. During the 19th century, a Patek Philippe became the dernier cri in royal courts. Queen Victoria bought one for herself and another for her husband. In 1897, King Rama V of Siam purchased no fewer than 56 watches, all destined for use by the royal family. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Tsar tried to entrust Patek Philippe with manufacture of all watches for his court, a commission that the company, with regret, was obliged to decline as it was already flooded with orders... many from the New World.
From Tennessee (distiller Jasper Newton of Jack Daniel’s was a Patek man) to Wall Street, the plutocrats of Gilded Age America regarded possession of a complicated Patek Philippe watch as one of the axioms of success. And by the early 1930s, Patek had cemented its reputation as the king of complications with the creation of the Graves Supercomplication (below), a massive multifunction pocket watch for New York banker Henry Graves. It surfaces in the world’s watch auction rooms from time to time, most recently fetching a little over £15.3 million in 2014. And there the Patek Philippe story might have ended. The Great Depression and Patek’s exposure to a bad debtor would have killed the firm had it not been for a consortium of investors headed by the Stern family.
And it is with the Stern family that the story of modern Patek and its march to 21st-century greatness begins. Just as the advertising encourages us to pass our Pateks on to the next generation, so the Sterns pass the entire firm down the generations. Above all, Patek is consistent and, as with thoroughbred racehorses, there are distinct Patek Philippe bloodlines. In the Dauphine hands and applied baton numerals of today’s Calatrava ref 5196, it is easy to discern the lineaments of its art deco ancestor ref 96. And today’s perpetual calendar chronograph, the 5270, can be traced back through the 5970, 3970 and 2499 to the 1518, the first ever series-produced perpetual calendar chrono wristwatch, production of which began in 1941.
The Sterns take their stewardship of Patek Philippe seriously. As they own the company, they have no shareholders cracking the financial whip for increased quarterly growth and higher dividends. And because they run the company (Thierry Stern is the incumbent president, but his father, Philippe, is still to be seen at the factory and one of his sons is an apprentice), it is preserved from the egotistical excesses of a salaried manager who wants to leave his or her mark on the brand. Moreover, when it comes to watches, Thierry really knows what he is talking about – he has designed many of them personally, among them the modern “grail” perpetual calendar chronograph, the 5970, the 5320 perpetual calendar and the celebrated and initially controversial Pilot.
Instead of the reactive ruthlessness of short-term marketing goals, the family can take the long view: when the rest of the industry was rushing headlong into the manufacture of electronic watches in the 1970s and early 1980s, Patek continued to make the best-quality mechanical watches. Indeed, one of its most celebrated movements, the Calibre 240 (pictured) with the 22-carat gold micro rotor, a true micro-mechanical masterpiece, made its debut at the nadir of the so-called quartz crisis in 1977. Similarly, the Nautilus 5711/1A-010 has long been part of the uniform of the super-rich, and Patek could have chosen to sell these by the tens if not hundreds of thousands. Instead, it discontinued the reference, because it fears that overdependence on one model would impair the long term health of the company.
It is this independence, allied to a stubborn belief in what it does, that accounts for Patek maintaining production of certain models because they are key to the Patek story rather than because they account for a huge proportion of sales.
For instance, in the early 1990s Patek could have quietly ceased production of the Golden Ellipse. Launched in 1968 with a dial of blue gold, it is neither oval nor straight-sided but somewhere enigmatically in between. During the 1960s, advances in mass production meant that cheaply produced watches were able to imitate the appearance of luxury timepieces with ever greater facility and therefore a design was sought that would, at a glance, be distinguishable from the common run of watches The design of the Golden Ellipse was of such superb simplicity that it soon became Patek Philippe’s most readily identifiable timepiece. It was such a success that by the late 1970s, 65 different models of Ellipse were in production. Moreover, there were Ellipse lighters, Ellipse cufflinks, Ellipse rings and even Ellipse astrological pendants. Inevitably, the Ellipse trend went the way of large astrological pendants – and a less horologically sensitive owner would have discontinued the line. But Thierry Stern kept it in the collection because it was an important part of Patek history, it being a watch introduced by his grandfather.
That is the point of collecting Patek. By wearing one you feel part of the ongoing narrative. And it need not be the financially crippling exercise that the £25.7m paid for a Grandmaster Chime at a charity auction in Geneva in 2019 might suggest.
Still, be warned. Patek Philippe is habit forming and many great collectors are like addicts: they can’t help themselves. Indeed, like many less benign intoxicants, a correctly chosen Patek Philippe raises the spirits, soothes the nerves, knits up the ravelled sleeve of care and all that... and the best bit is it can last forever. Patek undertakes to repair any watch it has ever made. As the advertising has been at pains to inform us for years, once we no longer have use for one, we pass it on to the next generation.
