Patek Philippe: The Impossible Collection

The Library Essay

Complication Is the House Language

Patek Philippe has made watches in Geneva since 1839 without interruption, and its reputation rests on the complicated ones, perpetual calendars, minute repeaters, chronographs, and the grand complications that combine them. Its pieces hold many of the highest prices ever paid for watches at auction, and the firm's habit of continuity, still family-owned, gives the collector the rare sense of buying from the same house the first customers did.

Nicholas Foulkes, the English historian of luxury and horology, chooses one hundred watches for Assouline's hand-bound Ultimate Collection format, published in 2023. No single collector could assemble them, which is the conceit of the series, and in this case very nearly the literal truth; several exist in single examples, and museums hold the rest.