La Majesté Tourbillon - AV003

Avantist La Majesté Tourbillon AV003

The Avantist La Majesté Tourbillon is a watch design co-developed by Avantist founder Keeran Janin and Sebastien Perret & Guillaume Tripet of the award-winning design company Etude de Style. This premise of this watch was to demonstrate what a new independent brand can achieve when working the best-of-the-best in independent watchmaking partners in Switzerland on.

The design experience of Etude de Style, top independent movement maker Concepto Watch Factory and the exceptional case-makers Queloz combined arguably make one of the best possible teams to create a watch. The first watch under the La Majesté series was delivered in 2017 as a gift to His Majesty the Sultan of Brunei on the occasion of his Golden Jubilee – which he wore proudly during this celebration.

Since then numerous variations of the La Majesté have been produced including this reference AV003 being kindly presented for the consideration of the GPHG jury.

AV003 is designed as our understated everyday dress watch in a precious metal (18k rose gold)

Movement and Materials

The watch is powered by a 72-hour manual winding skeletonized tourbillon with a sapphire baseplate; the movement was co-developed by Avantist and Concepto Watch Factory, being based of the Concepto 8100. The Sapphire base plate itself is mounted within a single-piece sapphire crystal torus that acts that the entire watch body case.

This combination was selected to give the impression that the movement floats freely within the watch and not actually ever touching the case (with all the internal sapphire surfaces receiving anti-reflective treatments to enhance this effect).

Finishing

The movements bridges are matte sandblasted with polished chamfers, to catch the light and reflect it in many directions. This method gives the piece more perceived depth and an interesting watch to admire when rolling the wrist.

Single-piece sapphire case – that is impact protected

Developed with Queloz SA, The single-piece sapphire torus is exceptionally thick for a Sapphire case. Not only allowing light to enter from all angles and for the movement to be viewed from the side (in particular watching the tourbillon carriage rotate from the 6H angle), the thickness and roundness of the case creates a strong lensing effect. This is gives the wearer endless enjoyment to play and admire the movement in different lighting situations and angles.

A major difficulty with creating full-sapphire cased watches is their fragility, impact can cause catastrophic damage and shattering. With this in mind we designed the watch to have metal or carbon components in the common impact and/or tension zones of the watch without compromising the clarity, light-flow and aesthetic visibility. Careful consideration was made so that when worn, it is actually very difficult to directly impact the main sapphire case part in typical day-to-day situations (drops, bumping corners of tables & doors, etc).

The AV003 features DLC black titanium lugs act as side impact protection and also the connection point for the strap spring bars (no direct force on the sapphire).

The bezel features a sandwiched 18k rose gold layer of that not only serves as the hour track and minute track but also has a small (1mm) exposed outer surface positioned strategically to receive any direct impact from bumping into doors, tables, etc. This component also acts as the screw points for the 18k rose gold case back ring. This in turn sandwiches the sapphire case-body and thus there are no screws directly acting on the sapphire lowering risk of breakage.