Rolex watches are repeatedly described in dramatic terms.
Flawless. Rare. Ruinously steeply-priced.
Just often times a Rolex appears that might also be defined – with a immediately face – as mythical.
This May, at Sotheby’s Important Watches Sale in Geneva, a one-off Rolex Cosmograph Daytona, customized-made for a Jstomer, and by no means sold at auction, is heading to the block.
The watch in query is a platinum ref. 16516 from 1999, set with a mother-of-pearl dial and ten diamonds.
It has an estimate of 700,000 to 1.4 million Swiss Francs – approximately £640,000 to £1.3 million.
That could already have made it a showstopper.
For years, its very existence was once the stuff of hearsay and hypothesis.
Because here's the kicker: platinum wasn’t even a thing for Daytonas within the past due 1990s. For over a decade, you need to have one in steel, two-tone, yellow or white gold – %%!%%c9e3bb53-0.33-4108-b0a0-d48c7bd820fa%%!%% platinum?
Nope.
Rolex didn’t start off producing platinum Daytonas in sequence until eventually 2013, to rejoice the variety’s 50th birthday.
Which makes this 1999 commission now not only ancient – %%!%%c9e3bb53-third-4108-b0a0-d48c7bd820fa%%!%% reasonably rebellious.
The watch became one in every of 4 Daytonas made for the comparable family members, all of that have the identical reference variety – the final digit of which, “6”, refers to the use of platinum.
Each one become powered through the Zenith El Primero automatic move, and had a dial that become a finished one-off.
"This watch is interesting," says Pedro Reiser, senior specialist at Sotheby's Watches Department in Geneva. "And the celebration of the sale is particular. These platinum Daytonas were element of a commission made rapidly to Rolex. They got 4 designated pieces out of it, each one with a totally different dial configuration."
The different three have prior to now made it to public sale at Sotheby’s, smashing their estimates.
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The first, with a mom of pearl dial, sold in 2018, after confirming the life of the watches. The 2nd, with a lapis lazuli dial, fetched a watch-watering HK$25.37 or £2.forty six million in 2020 — greater than tripling its common estimate – and on the time putting a brand new international checklist for a revolutionary automated Daytonas. The third, with a turquoise dial, bought for $871,000 (£657.000).
(These watches range from the "off-catalogue" excessive-jewellery pieces Rolex produces in tiny numbers on the market every yr, which are kept at the semi down-low, in that they have been privately commissioned.)
Watch-global folklore ties the introduction of the four platinum Daytonas to Patrick Heiniger, CEO of Rolex from 1992 to 2008.
Heiniger became a famously non-public, sharply tailor-made parent who grew to become Rolex from a respected Swiss maker into the global luxurious juggernaut we recognize right now.
But with that low profile and significant pressure got here whispers, and loads of them.
For years, collectors spoke in hushed tones approximately Heiniger sporting his possess platinum Daytona – lengthy earlier Rolex ever made one publicly.
People swore they’d visible it on his wrist, %%!%%c9e3bb53-third-4108-b0a0-d48c7bd820fa%%!%% it became disregarded as watch-nerd legend.
"Those are rumours, I really have no idea for convinced," Reiser says. "It's common that he beloved platinum. Because he wore a platinum Day-Date [a model that was made in the precious metal]."
But then Sotheby’s all started unearthing those platinum 16516s in 2018.
Suddenly, the myth had teeth — and collectors realised Rolex's mysterious CEO may possibly have commissioned the long-established secret set himself.
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When Heiniger took the reins from his father André in 1992, Rolex was once already a respected title. A gentleman’s logo. Swiss, sturdy, and quietly iconic.
But the new boss, who had a history in legislation and global diplomacy, had larger plans.
Under his leadership, Rolex went from revered to untouchable — an empire of steel and gold, woven into the fabric of recreation, art, cinema and aspiration itself.
Heiniger delivered creation completely in-condominium, tightened source, and hardened the model’s mystique like a diamond bezel.
Rolex not made simply watches — it made totems of luck.
"Heiniger changed into in simple terms the 0.33 CEO Rolex each had," says Reiser.
"Every CEO has kind of a very long time at Rolex. His leading achievement become the vertical integration in the visitors, bringing the bracelet producer, the dial producer, also the movement company, below one roof. The movements had been made off-site by using a legally self sustaining institution also known as Rolex Bien. They had been basically acquired by using Rolex SA in 2004. which is in reality no longer such a very long time ago.
"Without Patrick Heiniger, Rolex could now not be what that's at present."
After leaving Rolex, Heiniger greater or less vanished from public view. He reportedly cut up his time among Europe and the Bahamas, living very much off-radar. No interviews. No commercial memoir. The man behind The Crown had stepped again into the shadows. (He died in 2013, elderly sixty two.)
sotheby's
Sotheby's.
This very last ref. 16516 – the closing of the 4 commissioned portions to floor, consigned by the related household – comes with all of the appropriate bureaucracy, plus the rarest dial of them all: shimmering mom-of-pearl, punctuated with ten extremely good-reduce diamonds.
Come May, the final piece of the puzzle will fall into location.