Bring a Loupe: A Nautilus Retailed by Gübelin, A Platinum Santos Dumont, And A Chronometer-rated Cyma
Happy Friday, and welcome back to Bring A Loupe! Rewinding two weeks here to Thanksgiving week here in the States, our last standard edition of this column included some devastating personal news – losing access to my eBay account. The good news is that I’m back in after a few calls and a random address in Brooklyn, NY, receiving two iPhones and an iPad. I dug up a nice little vintage Omega eBay pick to celebrate all things being right in the world.
After the Longines “school watch” tourbillon pocket watch passed at Iconeek without a bid, we have just one result to recap. The Heuer Carrera ref. 2447 NST up for auction at Adam Partridge Auctioneers & Valuers in Cheshire, England, ended up selling for 8,800 GBP before fees. For a bit of a project watch in need of a crystal tension ring and crown, that number feels spot-on.
And here are this week’s picks!
Patek Philippe Nautilus Ref. 3700/1 Retailed by Gübelin with Box and Papers
I’ll go out on a limb to say that it’s a great time to buy a vintage Nautilus or Royal Oak. And when I say vintage, I mean true vintage, specifically the ref. 3700/1 and ref. 5402 respectively. These watches saw a somewhat dramatic increase in value over the last three to five years but have since retracted. With that pullback, so many collectors are just staying away from these great watches completely. At some level, the price decrease has prevented a lot of new interest from flowing in. That all said, it is nearly inarguable that these two Gérald Genta designs changed watches forever.
Introduced in 1976, the “Jumbo” Nautilus ref. 3700/1 epitomized the “luxury sports watch” and was famously advertised with the tagline: “One of the world’s costliest watches is made of steel.” The first Nautilus and this marketing did a lot to change the perceptions of watch buyers. No longer did a luxury watch have to be complicated and in precious metal. While onstage at our UBS House of Craft, Jean-Claude Biver told a great story about how Genta downplayed the similarities between the Royal Oak and the Nautilus by proclaiming the Nautilus was as if you put a Royal Oak underwater for years and years, a story I will never forget.
In really solid condition with box and papers, this particular 3700/1 is co-signed by Gübelin at six o’clock on the dial, making it all the more special. If you subscribe to my theory that a vintage Nautilus is a great buy right now, you might as well pony up for one that is truly special and made rare by a retailer stamp. Gübelin is among my favorite Patek stamps; it’s one of the most prestigious jewelers and watch retailers in the world. Plus, I’ve always loved the tiny detail of the umlaut over the “U,” tiny but really cool.
The seller, Adam Golden of Menta Watches in Miami, has listed this vintage Nautilus on his website for just today at $165,000. You can view the listing in full right here.
If a $165,000 Nautilus is not your thing, I love this 1930s Audemars Piguet listed by Menta yesterday as well. It has to be ridiculously rare.
1990s Cartier Santos Dumont Ref. 1575 in Platinum ‘Pre-CPCP’
The Santos Dumont is quickly rising up my rankings of Cartier models. The modern iteration is the best “standard” catalog men’s watch Cartier makes, and these neo-vintage executions are one of the more accessible ways to add a truly heritage-inspired and not super upsized Cartier to your collection. The reference 1575 is essentially the same watch as the ref. 96054, which came before it in the 1980s, was a lightly updated version of the ref. 78097, a part of the 1973 Louis Cartier Collection. I say all this not only to bore my audience with reference numbers but also to point out that this model has a direct lineage to true “vintage” Cartier. The Louis Cartier Collection was the first fully fleshed-out watch catalog at Cartier and was inspired by all of the best watches made up until that point. Long story short, the throughline from the first Santos in 1904 to the 1575 we see here is fairly direct.
This is where neo-vintage watches shine when the 1980s and 1990s technology and build quality are applied to great designs from decades previous, where the idea of everyday wear is not quite as realistic in today’s world. I would love to daily a 1910s Cartier Santos, but that’s not really smart to do. The 1575 offers much of the same look with stout build quality.
Finding this watch in platinum is no easy feat. You can dig up a few via listing sites like Chrono24, but typically, the asking prices are a bit inflated, up into the low to mid-20s. When most dealers get this watch in, their eyes light up because it is gorgeous and quite rare, but I find anything above 20k for this watch to be a bit rich. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but ultimately, it is on the small side and, therefore, has somewhat of a thin market.
As a “Pre-CPCP” variant, this particular one dates prior to 1998 when the Collection Privée Cartier Paris officially started. A quick and easy tell is the lack of “Paris” on the dial; this one is simply signed with “Cartier” at 12 o’clock. The watch is otherwise identical to the CPCP variant that came later, both powered by the high-end-for-Cartier, F. Piguet base, caliber 21.
The seller, Mike Nouveau, has listed this Cartier on his new website/app, Pushers.io, and is asking a reasonable $17,000. Check it out right here.
1950s Cyma Chronomètre
A while back now, on Bring A Loupe, I included a Zenith Chronometer caliber 135 alongside a Philippe Dufour Duality, and nothing looked out of place. I am fond of these vintage chronometer-rated time-only watches as they were the top quality, simple watches made in their era – not too dissimilar from Dufour’s aim today. Cyma is not a name many people know in 2024, but it was a really solid brand in the vintage period. It dates back to 1862, and the most notable part of the brand’s history is its partnership with Tavannes in 1903. In the ensuing decades, Cyma and Tavannes collaborated to create some great watches with excellent movements. Cyma is one of those vintage brands that modern watchmakers call out for having genius movement architecture; I’ll never forget Raúl Pagès calling out a Cyma movement as inspiration for his first watch, the Soberly Onyx.
This watch is powered by a Cyma caliber 216, which, while not the inspiration for a modern Raúl Pagès movement, is chronometer-rated and finely finished with côtes de Genève and seemingly solid anglage based on what I can make out from the seller’s photo. The dial side grabbed my attention as well with crosshair detailing, rose-gold tone hour markers, and syringe-esque hands that I like to call “skyscraper” hands, but no one else really uses that term.
The seller, Arrow Of Time, is located in Paris and has listed this Cyma for a very reasonable €2,750. Get all of the details right here.
1970s Omega Constellation with Breguet Numerals
I promised an eBay pick to celebrate my return to the platform, and here it is. This 1970s Omega Constellation is, like the Cyma, also chronometer rated, but that’s less important here as by the 1970s, Omega was sending most, if not all, of their many Constellations to be certified. In this era, Omega made a lot of watches and, in particular, a lot of different variants of the Constellation. Building on the brand cache of its first Constellation in 1952, Omega aggressively built out the model’s offering over the next few decades. By the 1970s, the Constellation was less a specific model with a gold case and “pie-pan” dial but more a signifier that the watch you are looking at was a premium time-only Omega offering.
So, while this one is in a stainless steel case, you get a little bit of extra sauce with an eggshell white dial and Breguet numerals. This style of numerals is not something Omega did a ton of back in the day, and they’re quite hard to find on Constellations. Thinking back to my days on the Hodinkee Shop Vintage Team, I remember a few Breguet-numeraled vintage Omegas crossing my desk, but typically, they were lower-quality, more “workhorse” Omega models like this one.
An eBay seller out of Homewood, Illinois (a town over from my hometown, by the way), has put this Omega up for auction, ending Sunday, December 15, at 1:04 PM ET. At the time of publishing, there are no bids at the opening price of $500. Check it out here.
1930s Universal Genéve Compur 30 Chronograph Ref. 12429
And a bonus eBay pick! This Universal Genéve Compur 30 falls into the category of vintage UG that is getting harder and harder to find ahead of the brand’s relaunch. My observation has been a lack of quality Universal examples hitting the market lately as collectors wait to see what the relaunch by Breitling means for the “value” of their old watches. Regardless, this is a great one. It is 36mm in diameter, 18k yellow gold, and has a beautiful-although-slightly-aged, two-tone dial. I find the dial aging to be quite charming actually. For reference, to find a dial with this true vintage two-tone look from a brand like Patek, you’re going to be spending over $50,000 if not $100k. This is where UG excels, offering the look of this golden era of vintage watches at a fraction of the price compared to the “big boys.”
The case was made by Jung & Fils, UG’s go-to source for solid gold chronograph cases, who also did work for JLC and a few others. It features nice large square pushers and these very interesting downturned and somewhat undersized lugs. This is a tip to how a 36mm watch was designed in the 1930s, the lugs do everything they can to “downsize” the look and feel of this “oversized” watch on the wrist. I love the small dial detail of the extended markers at three, six, and nine minutes in the sub-register at three o’clock – emphasized as calls were billed per three-minute increment back in the day. The serial number on the caseback dates this watch between 1938 and 1941.
An eBay seller right here in New York has put this Universal up for auction, ending Thursday, December 19, at 11:05 PM ET. At the time of publishing, bidding had reached $365. Get all of the details and photos right here.
Hodinkee
