It’s time for the return of the show-stopping table clock

For all that mechanical watchmaking is usually about miniaturisation, sometimes its masters like to display their talents on a grander scale. In 2025, brands and collectors alike have been enticed by the showstopper appeal of the most incredible clocks –statement pieces that bring the best attributes of today’s watchmakers to room-filling stature.

It has been the same story in the vintage market. In May, Phillips sold nine Cartier clocks that it described as ‘museum grade’ across its Hong Kong and Geneva auctions. The star lot was Portico Clock No.3, a 101-year-old ornate table clock in the ‘mystery’ style for which Cartier became famous. It sold for CHF3.9m (£3.5m), and still wasn’t the top story in an auction that also saw independent watchmaker FP Journe acquire a clock it had made for Breguet in 1991, the Sympathique no.1, for CHF5.5m (£5m).

That masterpiece is destined for FP Journe’s forthcoming museum in Geneva. But others are headed for – or already reside in – private collections. At Watches and Wonders in April, Chanel showed the Diamonds Astroclock, a contemporary take on a classic planetarium style that was produced by specialist clockmaker L’Epee 1839 (recently acquired by LVMH). With the movement housed in a glass sphere, the clock celebrated the constellation of Leo, both in its timekeeping display and with a white-gold lion sculpture set with 5,037 diamonds at the clock’s base.

Astronomical timekeeping was a popular theme: Panerai showed an updated version of its Jupiterium, a 100kg perpetual calendar planetarium that celebrates the discoveries of Galileo. As brooding and modern as the Chanel piece, it features the constellations of the zodiac picked out in green Super-Luminova, in keeping with the brand’s tool-focused aesthetic.

Van Cleef & Arpels, meanwhile, opted for a more ornate approach to what it calls its latest ‘extraordinary object’. The giant table-mounted planetarium is an evolution of a decade-old design, with a stylised shooting-star motif inlaid into the pale wood and the most impossibly detailed depictions of the planets, which orbit atop a celestial plane of lapis lazuli, accompanied by a mechanical melody as a gem-set shooting star emerges from a hatch to tell the time.

It is possible, however, to create a sensational clock without amassing enormous weight or complexity. Piaget’s latest clock is described as a ‘high jewellery mobile’, and sets a golden oval, set within it a smaller oval of opal, against four counterweights, also in gold, three of which are inlaid with semiprecious stones. With each individual clock differing slightly due to the natural variation of the stones, the mobile must be balanced accordingly.

By cutting against the grain of size, heft and mechanical complexity, Piaget has shown that there is more than one way to translate the aesthetic of a fine jewellery brand into a clock, bringing elements of its 1970s and 1980s heyday that are enjoying such a moment in today’s watch market.