Inside an Utterly Insane Collection of Watches From Independent Makers
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We recently published the definitive guide to the 25 greatest independent watchmakers in the world, and that got us thinking: What does an enviable collection of watches by independents look like in practice, and how might one go about assembling it?
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We knew just the guy to ask: A collector in Manhattan who’s spent more than a decade building a mechanical watch collection that’s now roughly 80 pieces strong and includes models by some of the rarest and most coveted independent makers working today, from avant-gardists like MB&F and Urwerk to relative traditionalist like Gr?nefeld, Simon Brett and F. P. Journe. Known as @nycwatchguy, he’s a venture capitalist with only one obsession that eclipses his love of watches: basketball. He asked to remain anonymous due to the security risks inherent to being a collector of high-end watches. We agreed—provided he was willing to let us handle and photograph his collection, and that he’d share the stories behind some of his most treasured pieces.
In 2011, the collector bought his first mechanical watch, a pre-owned Zenith El Primero Chronomaster. Shortly afterwards, he caught the bug for the independent watchmakers, captivated, he says, by “the risks they were taking and what they were doing relative to the Pateks and Richard Milles of the world.” In 2019, he made what in retrospect looks like a prescient move: He placed a deposit on the AkriviA AK-06, the first non-tourbillon wristwatch produced by the brand, whose founder, the rising young Kosovan watchmaker Rexhep Rexhepi, was not yet the horological superstar he is today.
This wise collector even had the chutzpah to request a small but meaningful custom detail: “I asked Rexhep to change the 25 on the power reserve indicator to a 23,” he says, referring to his favorite number. “Michael Jordan is God,” he explains. “I didn’t think [Rex would] do that. But God bless him, he did. It’s like burying an Easter egg in the dial. I’ll bring the watch to meetups and friends will study the watch. I’ll say to them, ‘Hey, do you notice something weird about this watch?’ And they’ll stare it forever until I say, ‘Look at the power reserve indicator. Michael Jordan once again.’”
After some dilly-dallying, as he pondered whether he could live with the model’s cushion-shaped case, he ordered one of the 25 stainless steel examples. “It took three years and in that time, Rexhep blew up, won the GPHG,” he says. “I just thank my stars I put down a deposit when I did because it’s given me access to him. Today, if he announced 25 pieces in each metal, they’d be gone in three minutes.”
In another example of fortuitous timing, the collector also scored the 1941 Remontoire model made by the Dutch independent label Gr?nefeld for the Only Watch auction overseen by Christie’s in 2019 (pictured above). Best known for its eight-seconds constant force mechanism, the one-off model’s solid silver dial features a very coarsely frosted surface with highly polished hour markers. “I was obsessed with the Remontoire, and was about to pull the trigger on one in the secondary market, which was selling for probably half off retail, and that’s when the Christie’s catalog came out and the piece was lot No. 1,” he says. “Holy smokes, that dial. I ended up getting super lucky on that one. No one was awake—maybe two people were bidding on the watch. I ended up stealing it at what probably would have been retail with a custom dial and an Only Watch at that.”
“It’s art I can take with me,” he says.
That’s especially true of his HM4 Thunderbolt wristwatch by MB&F, the groundbreaking independent label founded in 2005 by Max Büsser. “I think it’s the most audacious watch Max has done. The HM4 was the first truly 3-D watch, a chunk of metal sitting an inch off of your wrist. He took a huge risk putting that watch out. It was 2011, not nearly the independents scene you have today. I remember when it was released, I was just getting into watches and I read an article about the HM4. I remember being mesmerized. How does someone think of that? How does someone put it on their wrist? It took over 10 years for me to get comfortable with the idea I’d wear something like that.” In 2021, when a pre-owned HM4 became available, Büsser sent it to @nycwatchguy to try out for a week. The piece never went back.
“Everybody that looks at it on my wrist says, ‘What the hell are you wearing?’” the collector says. “Put me in a room with 50 people, and I’m the guy in the corner with my phone. But to events like that, I’ll often wear the HM4 because it’s an ice breaker and gets people to come up to me. It’s the ultimate conversation starter.”
Aren’t they all though? Lovers of the revered independent watchmaker Fran?ois-Paul Journe will appreciate the story of @nycwatchguy’s Tourbillon Souverain by F.P. Journe that he bought in 2023 from EsperLuxe, a retailer in Sudbury, Mass. “If you put a gun to my head and said I’d have to get rid of everything and could only wear one watch for the rest of my life, it would be this Journe tourbillon in platinum,” he says. “Though I wish I’d bought it in 2019 when Journes were still trading 60 percent below retail.” Like many Journe timepieces, the tourbillon, which traded for about $70,000 on the secondary market before the pandemic, saw a huge spike during the lockdowns, when its value peaked at about $350,000. Once prices began coming down, @nycwatchguy committed to buying it. After all, the piece, a platinum model with a grey dial, fulfilled his single most important criterion: The watch haunted him. “I couldn’t sleep at night thinking about this watch,” he says. “The fact that it’s from Journe, the fact that it’s a tourbillon, the symmetry of it—everything about the watch is perfect.”
The piece also taught the collector an important lesson: “If there is something gnawing at me, it’s better to just buy it now and not wait to see what happens,” he says. “I trust my own taste. Just pull the trigger now. But it’s a fine line between doing that and being a crazy person just pulling the trigger on everything.”
Then again, it takes a fair amount of crazy obsessiveness to pursue this hobby in the first place. Few watches embody the lengths to which collectors will go than the Urwerk UR-220 limited edition in @nycwatchguy’s collection. “Three years ago, somebody sends me a grainy picture on Instagram,” he says. “It’s clearly an Urwerk 220 Carbon but not with a regular color scheme.”
As it turned out, the Urwerk was a limited edition of just 23 pieces that super-collector Michael Jordan had made for his buddies at Grove XXIII, his ultra-exclusive golf club in Hobe Sound, Fla. “‘Holy crap, Michael Jordan and Urwerk together, I’ve got to own one of these watches,” the collector thought to himself. “I set out on this path asking everybody. Long story short: In the end, I got one of the 23 pieces he had made. It’s still the same case and movement but instead of green lume on everything, they went with white, red and blue—Carolina colors—and the most subtle of all flexes: In Roman numerals, it says 23 on top of the case.”
He pauses to reflect on all the watch means to him—how this tangible and portable piece of art unites his greatest passions, how even his basketball buddies light up when they hear the story—before coming to an apt conclusion: “The sickness of being a collector—it possesses you.”
The watch that might just blow us away the most was the Simon Brette that the collector recently picked up in France after attending the Olympics. “He’s such a humble guy,” the collector notes, showing the intimacy between collector and maker possible when buying from independents—perhaps the ultimate horological luxury.
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