Tourbillon

There is a category of collector who has already bought the obvious tourbillons and wants the conversation to be harder. This is what they buy.

The construction is the whole watch. A hovering hours and minutes dial sits at the top of the sapphire field, the gear train runs exposed to the right, and the tourbillon hangs below in a blued cage built as an open sphere rather than a flat carriage. Nothing is mounted on a plate you can see. The movement appears to be floating in the case.

The blue is not a coating. Heat-treated steel cages of this geometry are difficult to produce consistently, which is part of why watches like this come out of small Geneva ateliers rather than large ones.

On white rubber, in a polished white-metal case, the piece stays lighter than the complication suggests. It is a modern tourbillon rather than a classical one, and it wears accordingly.

Cecil Purnell is genuinely obscure, and that cuts both ways. The buyer for this piece is not buying resale liquidity. They are buying an object that a specialist will recognise instantly and everybody else will simply stare at.