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Did Elon Musk tweet about the 5711 yet?
I tuned into Boule’s watches auction in Monte Carlo on Thursday to listen to an auctioneer shout numbers in French for a few hours. A Nautilus 5711 hammered for soixante dix huit mille (€78k). Adding a 25% buyer’s premium, it seems we’re firmly in six-figure U.S. dollar territory for the Nautilus, for now at least. Is this peak Elon tweeting “GameStonk!”, sending it to a high before crashing back to Earth, or only the beginning of the frothiness? It’s more than that €60k hammer we saw at Aniquorum a couple weeks back, though the Boule 5711 may have been in better condition. Hard for me to say — I’m enjoying 10-degree temps in the American Midwest while the 5711 is thousands of miles away on a yacht in Monaco.
Looking past the watch that’s more detached from reality than Paris Hilton c. 2005, I wanted to highlight one more lot that performed well.
Nautilus 5711, to everyone
Lemania mania
A Lemania ref. 818 two-button chronograph for the British Royal Navy sold for about $10k all-in. This military Lemania chronograph doesn’t have much in common with the aforementioned Nautilus (and thank goodness). It was introduced a year before the first Nautilus ref. 3700 (1975), but in many ways, the Lemania’s got more going for it. It was extremely limited in production — only 500 were produced from 1975-76 (250 per year), it’s from the chronograph manufacturer that was making movements for pretty much everyone back then, and there’s that military provenance.
For dozens of years, Lemania made single-pusher chronographs for the British Ministry of Defense. But in the early 70s, the MoD updated its standards, allowing for two-button chronographs. So in 1975-76 Lemania produced this two-pusher model. Producing just 500 in total, this thing is rarer than pretty much any Nautilus that’s not made of platinum.
These ref. 818 chronographs were mostly destined for the Fleet Air Arm of the UK’s Royal Navy. There’s something raw and unadulterated about a Lemania chronograph made for the military. Sure, Lemania calibers were serving as the base for chronographs from Omega, Patek, and others for years, but a mil-spec Lemania for the British MoD just feels pure, stripping everything away to deliver only what’s absolutely necessary for a Royal Navy pilot. Namely, that’s a caliber 1872 inside a large, tough 40mm steel asymmetrical case. Like, those guys copping highly-decorated Patek perpetual calendars with a Lemania base were the ones compensating for the fact that they’d never be able to get their hands on this watch, not the other way around.
In fact, this same example sold for just ~$3.3k back in 2019, so it’s a nice increase for this particular watch in just a couple years. It’s part of a steady upward price trend we’ve seen in the few ref. 818 examples that have come up for sale over the past few years.[1]
Sample set of recent Lemania ref. 818 Royal Navy prices | Rescapement Graphics Dept
Often, we focus on booming prices of high-profile watches from Patek, Journe, and others, debating the unanswerable ‘is it a bubble?’ But this conversation ignores the steady price increases of real “collector’s watches”2 like this Lemania, which illustrate just how deep and strong the watch market is.
The Simple Life
Elsewhere, this Patek 1463 in yellow gold headlined Christie’s Dolce Vita sale, selling for €87.5k. This example’s got an interesting recent history too: It sold for €110k at auction back in 2019 before passing at Artcurial in 2020 where it had a healthy €110-150k estimate (damn flippers!). In other words, a yellow gold Tasti Tondi — a watch that no less than Wei Koh has called the green light at the end of the dock to his Gatsby — can cost less than a ref. 5711 right now. As a reminder, there were maybe 750 Tasti Tondis ever produced; there are literally about half that many 5711s on Chrono24 right now. Now that feels about as detached from reality as Paris Hilton.
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[1] One of the last to come up for sale was featured in Hodinkee’s Bring a Loupe (RIP). p.s. I’m so glad Substack supports native footnotes now to indulge my worst writing impulses. And much like our trade show coverage, our graphics department is run by my cat, who’s been learning PowerPoint during quarantine. Don’t worry, he’s already got his press pass for Watches & Wonders 2021.
[2] “Collector’s watch” is truly an insufferable term. But, I’m trying to say that you’ve got to at least do some research to know this Lemania even exists, and then wait around for one to pop up — only a couple come up for sale publicly a year.