Who says you can’t go home again" Breguet, the haute horlogerie timepiece manufacturer founded by the visionary 18th-century watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet, has built much of its modern collection upon its namesake’s historical invention, the tourbillon. The newest of these timekeepers pays the most direct tribute yet to the founder and to the Parisian atelier where he created his early masterpieces ? as well as displaying the 21st-Century technical and decorative mastery for which the manufacture has become renowned.

Breguet Classique Double Tourbillon 5345 Quai de l’Horloge

The Breguet Classique Double Tourbillon 5345 Quai de l’Horloge is unlike any other Breguet tourbillon watch that preceded it and yet in some sense a culmination of all of them. Its two-tourbillon movement, connected by a differential device and in spectacular full view behind a sapphire dial, rotates the entire plate in sequence with the passing hours, and its hand-finished array of components ? 738 in all, including no fewer than 81 jewels ? include mainplates and bridges in solid gold, a Breguet first. On the rear side of the manually wound Caliber 588N is the painstakingly applied micro-artistry that lends the model its name: a rendering of the “House on the Quai,” ? the workshop on Paris’s Ile de la Cité where Abraham-Louis Breguet plied his trade back in the days when he was providing timepieces to clients like Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie An...