While Chaumet is best known as one of the great Parisian jewellery houses, its involvement in watchmaking runs considerably deeper than many realise. The Maison established a dedicated watchmaking department during the postwar period, and in 1970, brothers Jacques and Pierre Chaumet acquired Breguet. Under their ownership, Breguet was repositioned towards high-end complicated watchmaking, eventually bringing Daniel Roth into the manufacture and establishing a workshop in the Vallée de Joux.
It is against this rather interesting period of Chaumet's history that the Les Pléiades was created. Introduced in the early 1990s, the collection is perhaps best known today for the mechanical reference 10A, whose unusual jumping-hour movement was developed with a young François-Paul Journe, years before he established his own manufacture.
Here, however, we have its smaller sibling, the reference 11A. Measuring just 30mm across, it retains the wonderfully unusual 'Pebble' shape of the larger watch, but packages it into considerably more compact proportions. Crafted from 18-carat yellow gold, the case is essentially a smooth disc of gold, with almost no conventional bezel or visible lugs to interrupt its profile.
The time display is equally unconventional. Rather than using traditional hands, the entire face of the watch is reduced to two small apertures, with the jumping hours displayed at 12 o'clock and the minutes below.
Unlike the mechanical 10A, the 11A is powered by a thin quartz movement. While that naturally makes the 10A the more horologically significant of the two, the quartz construction allowed Chaumet to reduce the watch to just 30mm while retaining the same unusual architecture. On the wrist, the result feels less like a conventional wristwatch and considerably more like a piece of jewellery, something that perhaps makes sense given Chaumet's background.
The mechanical Les Pléiades 10A understandably receives most of the attention today because of its connection to F.P. Journe, but the smaller 11A is fascinating in its own right. At just 30mm, its almost completely uninterrupted yellow gold case, unusual digital display and complete absence of branding from the front make it unlike almost anything Chaumet has produced before or since. Although exact production figures remain unknown, the reference is rarely encountered today, with relatively few examples appearing on the secondary market.
This Chaumet is, in my opinion, an obscure and wonderfully unusual piece of early 1990s watch design.
