Latest Review
It’s easy in this job to get into the habit of casually skimming press releases as they hit our inbox. We get a lot of new release announcements, and most of them, for one reason or another, never make it to the website. There’s a certain formula to these press releases that makes it easy for us to identify the key features and attributes of a new watch with a cursory glance, but there are certain releases where it really pays to slow down and drink it all in. For example, any new release from ochs und junior really demands your full attention simply because their creations are so deeply unusual and require a rethinking of watches and timetelling itself actually work. Such is the case with the new two time zones + date, the latest watch to be featured in the brand’s “ochs line” of series produced watches (as opposed to the fully customized watches that put them on the map).
Besides a commitment to stylizing their brand with entirely lower case letters, the thing that has always set ochs und junior apart is their commitment to creating complications that are as mechanically simple as possible. You see a lot of high end watch brands proudly announce that their ultra-complicated grand complications, for example, have untold hundreds of components and jewels under the hood. These stats are worn like a badge of honor. I can imagine Ludwig Oechslin and his team looking at these announcements and shrugging their shoulders – they simply have a completely different philosophy on how to build complications. The two time zones + date, which does exactly what it says it’s going to do (plus a little bit more) is built on top of a Ulysse Nardin caliber with only ten additional components, all of which appear to have been designed by Oechslin himself.
When you set out to design a complication using the fewest number of parts as possible, you do so with the understanding and goal of presenting that additional information in a novel way. The two time zones + date, when you first look at it, is a bit bewildering. If you know ochs und junior, you probably identify the dial’s outer circular apertures as being the date indicator right away (there are 31 circles in total, so the date is not read numerically represented visually). But the interior 12 hour track, the unusual hour hand, those small circular subdials at 12 and 6 (power reserve and running seconds, respectively) are all part of a unique timetelling language that is not immediately obvious, but once you understand it, it seems almost ingeniously straightforward. The hour hand and minute hand tell the current time, and the numerical hour within the hour hand’s big aperture represents a second time zone. This is made possible via a mechanical solution that couples the time zone disc with the date disc during the setting of the watch (when the crown is in position 1, turning it counterclockwise sets the timezone, while turning it clockwise sets the date), but decouples them while the watch is running.
Most watches that feature a second time zone complication use a 24 hour scale to display one of those time zones. That’s another thing that sets the two time zones + date apart from other watches that provide the same information. Both time zones are expressed in a 12 hour format here because, as ochs und junior puts it, it is assumed that the user knows whether the second time zone is ahead of the first. This is a relatively small thing, but underlines how sometimes less is more when it comes to mechanical complications, and seems core to the ochs und junior philosophy.
As part of the ochs line, this edition of the two time zones + date can’t be customized, so it will only be available with the PVD brown dial seen here. The case is 42mm in diameter and made of grade 5 titanium. Lume has been applied to all indices, hands, and numerals.
The retail price excluding VAT is CHF 6,900, with shipping expected four months from the date of an order. ochs und junior
