Patek Philippe Cubitus is Worthy of All the Attention
It is interesting what you see when you look carefully at the new Cubitus family from Patek Philippe. You see a following of lines; you see continuity of those lines and the angles. This is a bit different from the extremely popular Nautilus family, which was striking in that it combined somewhat different shapes. In the older and much more familiar watch, if you look, for example, at where the bracelet meets the case and extend that line visually to the bezel and then the dial, you see different lines.
In the Cubitus watches the lines follow. When the bracelet expands a bit where it meets the case, it blends in smoothly with the bezel and you don’t really see the case head-on except at the top and bottom. Everything blends rather nicely, including the extended shoulders on the side of the watch. This linearness works well with the straight horizontal lines on the dial.
Combine all of that with the softness of the curves on the sides and the bezel, the beveling and the changes in finish types, and add the fact that all of this is actually multi-layered (it must be cased up from the top) and you have a watch that can seem both solid and elegantly soft.
Patek Philippe hasn’t introduced a new family of watches for a quarter of a century, so this combination of relative simplicity and subtleness may surprise some who expected insanely technical complications. But the truth is, they do insanely technical complications rather regularly. The launching of new lines that stand on their own with the simplest of mechanisms? Not so often. Look at the simple, round Calatrava, still today considered perhaps the most classically beautiful watch face ever made.
They haven’t just stuck with their round watches historically either. The Golden Ellipse from 1968. The Nautilus in, would you believe, 1976. Gondolos, Aquanauts, and even the Twenty-4s as well as numerous shapes from the Art Deco era all point to the company adding pieces past the simple circles. But when President Thierry Stern decided to give a push for his wish for a “square” watch, they had a past that they could look back on but not draw too much from.
The Cubitus will definitely not be for everyone or even most people. Funny, that was what people said about the Nautilus and then everyone wanted one whereas the best watches were always the round ones. The new watch is on the large size for the current downsizing trend: it has a 45mm diameter for all three available models.
The Ref. 5821 date watches (hour, minute, and seconds hands and a date window) have a height of 8.3 mm while the more complicated Ref. 5822P-001 in platinum, with a few more complications, has a height of 9.6mm. So while the watch may sit wide on the wrist, it should fit well.
What is quite fun is the mechanical depth inside the platinum piece. It uses a new movement with what they call Instantaneous Grand Date, Day, and Moon Phases. This means all displays make the move instantaneously at midnight, and with a fairly nice click to them. This is as opposed to other watches where things all move slowly over a wider period. This preciseness of movement is why the company has six patents pending for this new watch.
It is called Grand Date because the two date digits in their windows are a bit large for readability and sit on one plane inside the watch, which means that they actually had to spread out the complication over two discs away from each other as opposed to when they all rotate in one place. Visually it ends up more balanced. And cleaner.
The model with the Date and Sweep Seconds is available in stainless steel or in rose gold and steel and both come with matching bracelets. The platinum model comes with a navy blue composite strap that has a fabric patter on it. And, as all platinum models do, a little diamond on the case at around 6 p.m. (baguette-cut for the first time ever and it does indeed work) where only the owner can see it. And that nice little click at midnight.