AUDEMARS PIGUET

Revisiting Audemars Piguet's Royal Oak Offshore Grand Complication

My watch friends know that whenever someone suggests that I should try wearing a large watch, I have a viscerally negative reaction. Why should I wear large, ungainly watches just because I'm 6'7"? What I realized they were saying was, "You should wear this watch because I wish I could pull this off, but I can't." Fair enough, but it's not a distinguishment I asked for or generally want. Well, this is one time I can say, "I can pull this off, but you probably can't." And man, am I happy I can.

This is one of the rarest birds in Audemars Piguet's catalog, something that the brand only trots out in limited edition runs: a Royal Oak Grand Complication. Not only that, but it's an offshore and semi-openworked one. I've been obsessed with these watches for a while because of their absurdity: 44mm wide, 15.70mm thick, a skeletonized watch with a perpetual calendar, moon phase, leap year indicator, split-second chronograph, and minute repeater. If the original Offshore was called "The Beast," what do you even begin to call this watch, one that eats up your wrist and weighs you down? I'm going with Jörmungandr – the world serpent eating its own tail in Norse mythology.

The kicker is that despite being an "Offshore," the watch should maybe be called "close to shore," with 20m of water resistance. That's the minimum water resistance Audemars Piguet is shooting for today. This is what happens when you add a minute repeater to any watch; more moving parts on the case mean less water resistance. But who cares? There's something awesome about a minute repeater for the sake of one.

Another Royal Oak Grand Comp that I spotted in Dubai during Dubai Watch Week

In 2013, Ben covered a different version of the Royal Oak Offshore Grand Complication at SIHH. Before that, we covered two semi-openworked versions of the watch in “normal” Royal Oak form in 2012. So this is technically more of a revisit to a watch that hasn't changed a ton over the past 11 years. But between Royal Oak and Offshore Grand Complications, I've only ever seen two in the wild.

This Offshore makes three, though it technically wasn't in the wild; it was in Monaco Legend Group's spring auction this year. It sold for €455,000 against an estimate of €350,000-700,000. When a black-pusher version of this watch was released in 2015, the estimated retail price was around $740,000. That means that not only is this, across the board, just an absurd watch but an absurdly expensive one and often not a great "investment" if you bought one new (as much as I loathe that idea of watches as "investments" in the first place). Regardless, I was (and remain) absolutely obsessed. I kept asking to take it out of the display case, expounding to anyone who would listen that this watch was the most ridiculously cool thing you could hope to find from a modern piece in an auction. Here's why.

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