Rethinking the Heirloom Watch

When you think ‘heirloom watch,’ what springs to mind? I think most of us probably default to grandpa’s hypothetical kitchen drawer Omega, or the Cartier Panthère that mom wore every day when you were a kid — or even the silly character watch you got as a kid that kicked off an obsession. Regardless, one constant is that, for the most part, we associate the term ‘heirloom’ with watches of particular significance (though not necessarily value) handed down through the generations. One thing we don’t often think about are watches gifted in the other direction, from child to parent. 

But sometimes, a watch pops up that rethinks this standard inter-generational path. Often, it’s something relatively straightforward, like a birthday gift for a parent, but occasionally, it’s something more than that. Recently, a watch came to my attention that most definitely fits into the latter category and offered a new perspective on what it means for something to be an ‘heirloom’ piece, to make it even better, the watch’s story comes from friend of Worn & Wound, Steve Faiello, better known to us all as @bulovas_and_bolt_actions. I sat down with Steve a few weeks ago to talk about collecting, and a very special watch he had made for his father late last year.

 

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Steve Faiello is a quintessential collector. Mechanically minded and, in his own words, needing some place to “dedicate [his] money and obsessive tendencies to,” Steve fell into watch collecting when he realized he couldn’t quite “see a big future” in other passions. “I was a car guy, but that takes up a lot of space and a lot of money. I collected old military rifles, and that’s a complicated thing — especially in the State of New Jersey.”

“I think what really hooked me with watches is it’s something you can wear every day so you can enjoy it. Which is great compared to some of the other hobbies, which are obviously much more specialized.”

Steve started wearing a watch relatively early in life (at least by modern standards), out of necessity, rather than interest, but the idea of wearing a watch didn’t quite stick, at least not at first. “I think the first time I consistently wore a watch was when I was in middle school and the wall clocks in our classrooms never worked. So I started wearing a watch. And then I got to high school and the clocks worked, so I didn’t wear a watch.”

“I picked [watches] up again in college. At that point I was working internships, I was on factory floors, and nobody wanted you to pull out a cell phone, so I started wearing a watch. And it was just one of those things that I wore to work, and then I kept wearing it when I was back at school, and then it just became one of those things you carried every day, like keys and a wallet.”

His tumble into watches really took shape thanks to an unlikely ally — his wife. “When my now wife and I started dating, we were talking about, ‘Oh, what would you like for Christmas, or your birthday, or whatever,’ and most of my other hobbies, I insisted on paying for myself, but she says I want to get you something nice, and so I’m like, ‘okay, I’ve got a watch — one watch that I wear all the time, it’d be nice to have another one.’ So we looked at a few different things and she bought me a watch as a Christmas gift the second year we were together. So now I’ve got two watches, which is nice.”

“Then when we got engaged and we’re going to get married, then she asks, ‘What do you want as a wedding gift?’ So I’m like, I want a watch, but I want a mechanical watch — because previously they were all quartz — so that got me a little more into, ‘all right, I’m going to do some research, look up brands, movements,’ that sort of thing.”

That research, which led to the purchase of a Hamilton Khaki Field Automatic for his wedding, eventually led Steve down the path of looking backward, specifically toward a gold-plated Bulova that he knew his grandfather had worn when he was younger.

“I knew it existed, but I’d never really seen him wear it. And at that point, he had passed away years before. But as I was starting to think, ‘Huh, maybe I should look into watches.’ I asked my father, ‘I know Grandpa had this Bulova. Do you think my grandmother still has it? And do you think I’d be able to have it?’ And so he asked and she gave it to me along with one or two other random old watches that were kicking around. And that turned me from [someone] looking [for] something that I could wear every day… to obsessively researching the brands and the history and the details — and it just went off the deep end from there.”

In the years since, Steve has picked up some truly special watches. Whether it be vintage Grand Seikos, modern Sinn divers, high-accuracy quartz Citizens, or unbelievably beautiful Fears dress watches, Steve has developed an eye for the unique and the well-considered. That’s what drew him to Dekla, a small German company with a dedicated following and a staunch commitment to quality and manufacturing.

“I think I saw them on a watchuseek thread in 2019 or 2018, and I’d always liked German watches — deck watches and fliegers and that sort of thing — and they were a company that I thought was doing particularly interesting things. Because they make all the parts themselves, they tend to do interesting materials, and they are very high quality, but what really stuck with me was [that] their marine watch was the smallest case available for 6498 or 6497 Unitas movement.”

Steve’s interest and awareness in Dekla also happened to coincide with an idea, one inspired by the go-between that had helped him get his hands on his grandfather’s Bulova — his own father.

“My father is not a watch guy. He wore Timexes and Casios and just wore them until they died, and then when he got a cell phone, he stopped wearing watches because he didn’t need one anymore. But as I’ve gotten [into] various hobbies, he’s listened and taken at least a cursory interest because he and I are a lot alike and he could appreciate it.”

“But I had gotten his father’s watch, and I would wear it for holidays and weddings and other special events… and even though he wasn’t really passionate about it or that interested himself, he’s [realizing] ‘I don’t have anything like that, and it’d be nice to have something like that.’ It’d be nice [for him] to have something of his own that he could wear until he got old and then pass it on to me or my kids… But because he wasn’t really that into it, he’d never really — it was like a cursory look and we talked about it a few times, but he never really went too far. So I’m like, ‘Okay, one of these days, we’ll sit down and figure out what to buy, and depending on what he liked, maybe I’ll buy it for him as a gift,’ because he’s one of those guys where you can’t buy him anything.”

But what watch do you get for a guy with no real interest in watches? Especially if you want it to have significance, not only for him but for future generations as well? It’s a hard question, but one that was answered by a pocket watch, one that had been sitting in a drawer for most of its life, and one that laid the foundation for an incredible gift.

Pocket watch conversions are not a new concept, there are plenty of brands out there taking old movements from unloved or disused pocket watches and breathing new life into them by re-casing them. But these watches, which are most often made from turn-of-the-century railroad watches or other chronometers, tend to be big, almost ungainly, and there’s been a tendency to try and maintain not just the movements of these watches, but the dials and hands as well, making watches of this style a bit of a mishmash which, though certainly appealing to many, are not necessarily a great choice as a gift for a guy with limited interest in watches.

Thankfully, the pocket watch in question wasn’t some kind of masterpiece from a bygone era — actually, it wasn’t really a watch of any note whatsoever. It was just a Christmas gift that had been sitting in a drawer since 1976. “This isn’t like an elegant ‘20s railroad Hamilton or something. This is like a cheap, stamped, gold-plated case with a kind of ridiculous, over-the-top, ornate — like cheesy, [it’s] really cheesy looking. But it had a 6497 or a 6498. And I’m like, ‘That’s something useful.’ Maybe one day I could do something with that movement.”

“So as we’re talking, he’s interested in having a watch for himself, and I’m looking at this pocket watch, and I’m like, ‘We’ve got a good movement here.’ Everything else is a throwaway — not the most ideal — but you could take the movement and put it in a case with a dial and style that he’d like and then give it to him. That seems like a pretty cool project.”

And so, armed with a Unitas movement hidden in a hideous pocket watch from the ‘70s, Steve started thinking through what it would take to actually make a project like this come together. “I’ve got a watchmaker who, for not an enormous amount of money or enormous amount of difficulty, could [make] something cool, and [my dad] won’t say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have done that’ because it’s his watch that I gave back to him that he could wear himself. So that’s when I remember Dekla makes really impressively well-thought-out cases for that movement family.”

So Steve reached out to Dekla and started pulling together the pieces to make his dad the perfect heirloom watch. Steve settled on Dekla’s Marine Deckwatch as the design of choice for his father’s new/old watch and, after some back and forth and waiting a few months for the parts to arrive, was able to work with his local watchmaker to pull off something truly special, a one-of-a-kind piece for his father, which he finally gave him for Christmas last year.

“He was at first very confused why I was giving him a watch, and then I explained — I told him to turn it over (because it’s a display caseback) — and I’m like, ‘This came out of your pocket watch.’ He was just astounded that you could do such a thing and he doesn’t wear it much, but we had a first birthday party for my son a few weeks ago and everybody’s dressed up and whatnot, and I went over and said hello to him and he went and checked the time. I’m like, ‘You’re wearing the watch.’ He says, ‘Yeah, of course, this thing’s cool.’”

“I don’t think he’s going to be a watch guy… [but] my goal was to give him something like my grandfather’s Bulova, which is not something you wear, not necessarily in everyday wear, but something that he values and can break out for special occasions. And then, he could say, 20 years from now, to my son, ‘This is my watch. I always cared about it. Now it’s yours.’”