The upcoming Hong Kong auction of Antiquorum will present the one-of-a kind hand-made prototype created by the ‘Le Garde-Temps, Naissance d’une Montre’ project by Greubel Forsey, Philippe Dufour and Michel Boulanger. The auction will take place 31 May, Saturday, 2025, at Mandarin Oriental HK.
UPDATE – 2 June: Antiquorum announced the results of its May 31st 2025 Hong Kong auction, which yielded a total of HKD 76,163,750 including buyer’s premium. The ‘Naissance d’une Montre’ École timepiece was sold for HKD 10,000,000.
I heard about the ‘Le Garde-Temps, Naissance d’une Montre’ project 10 years ago in Budapest, where we had a great conversation with Stephen Forsey (esteemed watchmaker and co-founder of the brand Greubel Forsey). ‘We are really afraid that one day we’ll just stare at these traditional watchmaking tools and there’ll be no one who could function them. This situation is rather fragile; may anything happen to these people it could mean the total disappearance of centuries old knowledge.” – explains Stephen Forsey why he and Robert Greubel initiated the project with Philippe Dufour a few years ago. ‘Our goal was to record the traditional watchmaking techniques by involving someone, who could convey this knowledge to the next generations.’ They found Michel Boulanger, a teacher from the Diderot vocational training college in Paris, who was selected eventually for the project and the work commenced in 2009. The first, unadorned Montre-école was presented in 2015.
In 2019 we had the chance to learn more about the progress of the project from David Bernard, director of the Time Æon Foundation, an initiative aiming to save the soon extinct traditional watchmaking know-how that once shaped timepieces. Check out our conversation here.
This May among some other highly anticipated timepieces, the Antiquorum HK auction includes the Lot 349 – a hand-made prototype created by the ‘Le Garde-Temps, Naissance d’une Montre’ project, previously sold for USD 1,461,507 at Christie’s Hong Kong auction in 2016.
This timepiece represents 9 years of dedication and skill from the above mentioned four masters, completely handcrafted with every minute component built from scratch, embodying the essence of ultimate watchmaking craftsmanship. This unique, entirely handmade masterpiece is estimated at HKD 8 million.
The auction preview will be held 28-30 May, 2025, at the Antiquorum Hong Kong showroom.
Photo credits: Antiquorum. Greubel Forsey. Loupiosity.com
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