Through my friend Alon Ben-Joseph of ACE Jewelers, I met with Itay Noy during BaselWorld 2009. Itay (originally from Tel Aviv) got his Masters Degree in Design at the University of Eindhoven in The Netherlands. Design is also the first and most important aspect of his watches, as he showed me some examples of his watches during our lunch in Basel.

For the Pilgrim dates, from 8th of May till the 15th of May, Itay is offering five (out of 99) of his San Pietro watches from the City Squares series with almost 25% discount! This means that this 3300 USD watch will now sell for  2500 USD, that’s nearly 25% off.

The San Pietro watch is a stainless steel (316L) wrist watch, limited to 99 pieces only. The diameter of the San Pietro watch is 42.4mm and is 10mm thick (or thin), it has a scratch free sapphire crystal, is water resistant to 50 meters and will be delivered on a quality hand made leather strap. Itay chose for a solid and proven ETA 2824-2 movement.

Numbers, 05/99, 09/99, 12/99, 15/99 and 22/99 are being offered by Itay Noy.

The special part of this watch is the enamel painted dial. It shows the piazza di San Pietro in Vatican City, as designed by Bernini.

The watches are numbered on the dial and clearly show the Vatican City map, with in its center, the Piazza di San Pietro.

If you are into design watches, have a weak spot for enamel dials or for the San Pietro square of course, give Itay Noy a visit and make sure to order one of these 5 watches before the 16th of May.

Lüm-Tec in conjunction with Watch and Clock Forum Announce “Design the Next Lüm-Tec project.”

Lüm-Tec in conjunction with Watch and Clock Forum are offering the chance for the members of www.watchandclockforum.com to design a new Lüm-Tec watch to be produced in 2010. People wishing to take part in this effort can join www.watchandclockforum.com (membership is free.) and enter the special design forum which was created specifically for this project. For those that do choose to take part in the design project. After the design is completed, there will be a special drawing. The prize will be one of the newly designed watches.

ABOUT Lüm-Tec and Watch and Clock Forum:

Lüm-Tec is a new watch company making custom and limited edition watches, creating unique designs, and pioneering new luminous technologies to apply to wristwatches. This is a different kind of watch company, as the influence for it’s designs come from direct communication from their buyers and from public online discussion forums. Taking input from the actual end user makes it possible to create what the market desires, and keep a reasonable price point which anyone can afford.

Watch and Clock Forum, owned by Thomas Carey, is one of the newer internet discussion forums that is devoted to the discussion of both watches and clocks. The site has members for all over the world taking part in the discussion. Watch and Clock Forum also is running a contest series which you can learn more about by visiting the web site.

Follow this link to go the Lüm-Tec / Watch and Clock Forum project directly: http://www.watchandclockforum.com/viewforum.php?f=121

Lüm-Tec watches can be directly ordered on their website, or through their network of dealers. I think it great to see that these relatively new brands certainly know how to use the internet properly. The established brands can learn from this More about that later on…

Starting on the 19th of January, the annual SIHH is being held in Geneva. The SIHH, Salon International de la Haute Horlogerie, represents a number of fine watch manufacturers like Audemars Piguet, Officine Panerai, Jaeger LeCoultre, Vacheron Constantin and a few more. One of them is Cartier. Cartier once started out as a jeweler and in the 1900s, it was one of the first to create a wrist watch. I think everyone knows (or should know) the Santos-Dumont story.

Anyway, I didn’t classify Cartier as being a haute horlogerie brand for a long time. I just recently became interested in the brand, after talking to Treo. Treo is the owner of a dedicated Cartier website called Troisanneaux. After talking to him, I ordered the book ‘Cartier – The Tank Watch‘. This watch is to me, the classic rectangular wrist watch.

One of the more recent Cartier models is the Ballon Bleu watch. I was actually quite stunned by this model and I still don’t know if it’s a gents or ladies watch. With 42mm, I assume it is the first one. However, and this goes for most Cartier watches, there is an ETA movement ticking inside. Although I think that these ETA movements have proven themselves over time and can be qualified as reliable and sturdy movement, it bugs me a little bit that these expensive Cartier watches have an ETA movement inside. Perhaps I am still one of the few who is bothered by paying more than x Euro for an ETA driven wristwatch and is it becoming silly, I don’t know . What I do know, is that the design of these Cartier watches, the finish of the dials and the beautiful (and typical) crown are compensating for this.

The design of Cartier watches is almost indisputable. Wonderful created cases, most of the time in precious metals like white gold. Guilloche dials with stunning designs. These watches are like art . But given the fact that movementwise, these watches are hardly any special, would you buy one just for the superb design? If the price is right, I probably will add a Cartier Santos Galbee in my collection in the (far) future. It is the classic rectangular watch imho.

Do you consider Cartier watches as jewellery or as haute horlogerie? Please share your thoughts with me by clicking on ‘Comments’ below.