Audemars Piguet is sometimes criticized as being a one-trick pony due to the iconic Royal Oak‘s outsized presence in its catalog, with three of the brand’s four current collections consisting soley of different types of Royal Oaks. (Technically, there are five collections, but the fifth has just two watches that were released over a five-year period, neither of which is still available.)
This criticism comes largely from a place of love. As one of the “Holy Trinity” of high Swiss watchmaking, AP has an illustrious back-catalog filled with countless covetable references that, unfortunately, have no modern equivalent.
But Audemars has quietly been addressing this frequent criticism lately by elevating its only non-Royal Oak collection, the Code 11.59. While met with a lukewarm reception when it debuted in 2019, the line has been grown to be something of a dark horse in the market thanks to an ever-increasing stable of desirable models. For example, when AP unveiled its impressive new perpetual calendar calibre earlier this year, it did so with a Code 11.59 — not the Royal Oak (though that came very shortly after).
Now, AP has once again turned to the Code 11.59 for a very cool creation. In fact, it’s probably my favorite watch from the brand this year.
Star Power
Buried in the Code 11.59 catalog is the Starwheel, a unique watch with a wandering hours complication. This type of complication consists of three discs (or other objects) on the dial, each with four numerals equally spaced apart. The discs are all in constant incremental movement along the dial so that, one by one, they align with a stationary minute track to tell the current time. Every time the hour changes, the next disc moves into place with the next hour ready to go.
The Starwheel — which is a spectacular name for such a watch, btw — features a partially skeletonized outer case of white gold around an inner case in black ceramic, while its dial boasts a dark blue aventurine backdrop for a trio of rotating black PVD aluminum discs that tell the hour against a minute track located between 10 and 2.