ch 1723

With a refreshing return to simplicity among perpetual calendar watches, Chronoswiss releases a new addition to the luxury calendar watch family with the Perpetual Calendar line. The CH 1720 -1723 are finely shaped 40mm watches in styled with traditional pocket watches in mind. If it were not for the attached straight lugs and smaller size, you'd never know this was anything but a beautiful classic pocket watch. For this new traditional timepiece, Chronoswiss uses a base in-house made caliber C. 127 movement with a Dubois-Dépraz sourced 5800 C calendar module.

The many functions of a perpetual calendar complication are neatly laid out on the dial using three subsidiary dials and one aperture window that features the moonphase. Notice that the top subdial used to display the month is set out to display the months for a total of four years. The reason for this is to indicate if the current year is a leap year which adds a day to February. A perpetual calendar is defined as one that is able to compensate for leap years and thus only rarely needs adjusting (that is unless you forget to wind it).

Like most Chronoswiss watches, the "onion" crown is larger than you'd expect for the watch size, but allows for comfortable winding of the movement. The layout design is perfect from a legibility standpoint with the blued steel hands being the perfect width and length. The case is available in five different materials: there is a limited edition platinum model, a steel model, and 18k yellow, rose, or white gold models. The dial face is a machine polished sterling silver in an off-white color finish. Securing the watch is an alligator strap. I'd have to say that this is one of the most desirable Chronoswiss watches I've seen in a while, with flawless execution of the Roman numeral hour markers, and a sublimely attractive yet simple design.

Ariel Adams publishes the watch review site aBlogtoRead.com.