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The Five Most Expensive Watches Money Can Buy

written by A.Morgan - 27th Apr 2011

The news is just sinking in – you’ve won the lottery. You’ve won it BIG. Your mind is racing with the thought of all of those previously out-of-reach items that are now available to you. You can’t think straight. Your brain is an excited mush.

So it’s just as well that we’re here to give you a helping hand, and point you in the direction of the five most expensive watches on the planet. You’re going to want to show off to your new next-door neighbours in the manor house three miles down the road, so no ordinary watch is going to cut the mustard. Perhaps you might consider something from the most prestigious watch brand ever?

Number five in the world’s most expensive watches is a 1939 Patek Philippe World Time. It features twenty four different time zones and a day and night indicator, and sold at auction for $4million back in 2002. It is a handsome watch, but might be considered a little plain by some – so perhaps not the right material for your lottery win spending spree.

The perfect watch needs to be something different, something exotic – so how about the Louis Moinet Meteoris? Priced at a cool $4.5million, it is strictly speaking a collection of four watches, all display mounted on an extravagant mechanical planetarium. Four watches for the price of one? That’s almost a bargain.

Four watches for the price of one!

The watches follow the theme of space, and each one incorporates a different piece of meteorite, giving the collection its name. The first watch, the ‘Tourbillion Mars,’ is made from 18-carat white gold and is set with 56 baguette-cut diamonds, totalling 3.46 carats. As the title suggests, the inlaid meteorite in the dial is from Mars, and was found in Oman in 2008. The ‘Tourbillion Rosetta Stone’ is the next in the line-up, made from 18-carat rose gold and home to a slice of Sahara 99555. Believed to be over 4.5 billion years old (inspiration for the price, perhaps?), it is the oldest known rock in our solar system. A piece of asteroid adorns the third, ‘Tourbillon Asteroid.’ It is thought to have originated close to the Sun, and has provided scientists with invaluable information about this little-known area of space. Its mottled grey appearance is set off by the baguette diamond-set white gold case. The fourth and final piece is in rose gold, and contains fragments of Moon that fell to Earth as meteorites in 2001, and is predictably called, ‘Tourbillon Moon.’

Louis Moinet Tourbillon Moon

But if this is too much of a bargain for you, then it won’t be of concern that only one set was made and has subsequently been sold. Anyway, technically these four watches are only a paltry $1.1million each, and carrying the mammoth 100 kilo planetarium around with you just isn’t practical. You want something that will really impress.

This brings us to the third most expensive watch you can buy. It is another Patek, and one of just two ever made, so it is exclusive as well as expensive. The reference 1527 is an 18-carat gold chronograph wristwatch, with a perpetual calendar and moon phases, and came into being in 1943. It fetched $5.7million under the hammer mid-2010, so you would probably need to wave even more cash than that under the new owner’s nose to get them to part with it. And if you’re going to spend a little bit more, why don’t you do it properly and spend a whole lot more on the most expensive man’s watch ever?

Built for American banker Henry Graves in 1933, the Patek Philippe Supercomplication is a tour de force of luxury watchmaking. Cased as a traditional pocket watch, it features a staggering twenty four complications, including a perpetual calendar, moon phases, minute repeater, rattrapante chronograph and a chart of the night sky as seen from Henry’s New York apartment. It was commissioned as a challenge to Patek, fuelling a friendly watch-complication war between Henry and friend James Ward Packard, and took three years of design and five years of construction to complete. In comparison the Empire State Building, built the same decade, took just over a year to construct. It remained the most complicated watch until it was surpassed in 1989 by another Patek, the sheer cost of undertaking this kind of movement ($15,000 for Graves) making it very prohibitive.

So before the shock of your lottery win sinks in and begins to make you feel woozy, let’s take a quick look at the most expensive watch in the world right now. It’s the only ladies watch in our list, and it isn’t actually for sale and probably never will be. Ladies and the gentlemen, I give you the Chopard 201 Carat ‘Chopardissimo’. That’s no typo – 201 carats. Of diamonds. It’s as if Chopard have developed a diamond magnet and carried it through a Tiffany & Co. store. The biggest of the 874 diamonds is 15.37 carats and internally flawless, one of a trio of huge, heart shaped diamonds mounted around the face. A spring-loaded mechanism opens them up at the push of a button, mimicking a flower opening its petals to the rising sun. This is the most outlandish, intricate, incredible and downright sparkly object money can buy, and is valued at the eye-watering price of $25million.

Well, that’s one headache taken care of for your new lottery-winning lifestyle, and a whole load off your mind. Well, that is until Jaeger LeCoultre finally put a price on their new 18-carat gold and diamond-laced Joaillerie 101 Manchette. But until then, happy spending!