THE GOOD LIFE Watches
And now for something completely different
Fed up with ‘making pearls for swine’, FP Journe struck out on his own. Today his extraordinary, original timepieces can fetch more than £1 million. What makes the Geneva-based watchmaker tick?
Words Timothy Barber I
n the 17th and 18th centuries, watch- makers might inscribe their surname and the Latin word fecit – ‘made by’ – on the movement of a fine timepiece.
And for certain geniuses like John Arnold or Thomas Earnshaw, watches that included novel innovations of their own devising would see the inscription extended to invenit et fecit: ‘invented and made by’. It was presumably with an eye on history – and his place within it – that in 1999 the French watchmaker François-Paul Journe appropriated invenit et fecit as a dial slogan for his own, newly launched wristwatches. It’s hardly as if he was retiring about his ability to create masterpieces. Journe made his name in the 1980s by re- creating the miraculous ‘sympathique’ inven- tion (a pendulum clock that could mechanically set and regulate a connected pocket watch) of the 18th-century master Abraham-Louis Breguet, and spent several years developing complex watches for marquee brands such as Cartier and Piaget. Asked in 1999 why he was now striking out on his own, he gave an immortal reply: ‘Because I’m fed up with making pearls for swine.’ He announced his FP Journe brand to the world with two watches of dizzying ambition:
(subscription) scheme, in which down pay- ments enabled Journe to make a run of watch- es, with the balance then paid on completion. Subscriptions were snapped up, and FP
first, a sumptuous tourbillon at a time when almost no one could produce a tourbillon wristwatch; next, a watch that drew on the science of resonance – a bewildering oscillatory magic in which two independently vibrating balance wheels mysteriously synchronise – in the cause of chronometric accuracy and sheer horological swag. He was able to make these thanks to an idea he borrowed from Breguet: clients were invited to join a ‘souscription’
Journe has remained the darling of top-end collectors ever since. His watches exhibit the kinds of intellectual rigour, gorgeous aesthetics and clear handcraft that are catnip to the horological hardcore, as is their rarity: only around 800 are produced by hand each year. In 2019 he invenit et fecit one of the most astounding timepieces I’ve ever seen, an astronomically-themed super-watch contain- ing 18 mechanical functions and indications. The Astronomic Souveraine, as it’s known, is a snip at £700,000, but one suspects that there’s plenty that 64-year-old Journe has yet to invent. ‘I create a piece because I want it, I dream it,’ he told the New York Times recently. ‘I make it like it was a new child.’ While the adoration of aficionados is one thing, the company has recently crossed a more unexpected frontier. Quite suddenly, it has broken through to the wider audiences enjoyed by much bigger marques, rocketing into true blue-chip investment territory. FP Journe is now an asset class. This is unicorn-rare: while certain brands enjoy huge demand for particular watches,
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