The Daytona that went to the glacier

Mr. Patrick A. has spent years walking glaciers. He kept returning to Arolla in Switzerland, and specifically to the blue of its ice caves. When he handed his Rolex Daytona, a 116500, to Artisans de Genève, that blue was the brief. “A unique place, out of time,” he calls it in the workshop’s account. He wanted its transparency on his wrist.

Months for one blue

By the workshop’s own account, the colour was the hard part. It spent months of repeated attempts translating the client’s glacier into a specific blue, and then had to build that blue twice, in two different crafts.

The bezel insert carries blue sapphires on a white gold base, set invisibly. The workshop says the work took hundreds of hours. Stone meets stone. No metal shows. The workshop did not publish a stone count or dimensions for the finished watch.

The dial is cut from blue sapphire. It is translucent enough for the movement to show through and, according to the workshop, fragile enough to have taken several months to develop. A white decal carries the printing.

Beneath the sapphire dial, the openworked X rotor was the client’s request. Artisans de Genève says he wanted the glacier’s peaks turning over the movement.

On a steel bracelet

Our photographs were taken years after the workshop’s, and the configuration they show differs from the one documented at launch. The watch is on a steel bracelet rather than the translucent blue strap. The photographs do not explain when or why the configuration changed.

A blue band around the steel crown appears in all three published photographs. The archived page does not list a crown treatment, so the frames alone do not establish whether the band belongs to the commission.

In our photographs the dial’s blue breaks into lighter and darker patches as the light moves across it, closer to ice than to lacquer. The baguettes on the bezel read as one continuous band of colour. On the wrist, the watch is still unmistakably a Daytona. The closer the camera comes, the more of the movement the sapphire dial lets through.

Price and availability

Production. A one-off customisation commissioned by the watch’s owner.

Service cost. CHF 62,260, as of May 2022 (personalization service price on the archived 2022 page; no tax basis)

The archived project page of 26 May 2022 displayed 62,260.00 CHF as the price of the personalization service, no tax basis stated. The page has since been removed and the figure cannot be re-checked. The client supplies the watch. Under its own terms, Artisans de Genève sells a customisation service.