Vacheron Constantin’s Club 1755 is catnip to watch fans

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The author is the City editor at FT Alphaville

Three watches are in my regular rotation. There’s a Casio digital, a Russian-made Raketa with a Braille face for checking discreetly when meetings drag, and a Rolex that has sentimental value: it reminds me of the time I took a bus to near the Hong Kong-China border to buy a fake Rolex.

Watchmakers have, nevertheless, helped pay my rent. Their adverts on these pages have been a reassuring constant through any number of once-in-a-lifetime financial crises. Journalism owes a lot to haute horology. The least we can do is try to understand its appeal.

Club 1755 seemed a good place to learn. It’s a London penthouse owned by Vacheron Constantin which, with Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe, makes up Swiss watchmaking’s so-called holy trinity.

Luxury brands often guide their richest customers upwards, where cheaper floor space allows for a more leisurely one-to-one sales pitch. A staircase in Patek’s Mayfair boutique leads to its “celestial room”. Nearby, Audemars’ AP House has no street-level presence at all.

Club 1755 leans in even further to in-the-know exclusivity. Entry, by invitation only, is via an unmarked door in a utilitarian office block south of Vacheron’s Old Bond Street showroom, then past a reception desk whose nameboard only lists a hedge fund and a private credit firm. Take the lift to the top floor and you’ll find a sort of gallery space, long and narrow, with a terrace at one end and a watch-servicing booth at the other.

There are no display cases to cheapen the tone. Product is on screen, as in a videoconferencing suite where clients discuss with Geneva their bespoke builds, whose prices tilt into seven figures. Art fills the space instead.

The guest artist when I visited was Conrad Shawcross, whose mechanical sculptures riff on the themes of timekeeping in ways explained at length by a wall-sized sign near the lift.

After buying Vacheron (founded in 1755, hence the name) in 1996, Richemont introduced a strategy of raising prices faster than production volumes. It worked. Annual sales last year exceeded €1bn for the first time. Morgan Stanley analysts estimate that Vacheron sold 35,000 watches at an average price per piece of nearly SFr40,000 ($46,300) pre-tax. It is among the top 20 Swiss marques by revenue — only Richard Mille has a smaller annual production.

Desiring such a thing challenges rational explanation. Watches can be easily transportable stores of value, though Vacheron resale values have been notably weak since the pandemic bubble burst. They can be status symbols, family heirlooms or memento mori, but fear of crime keeps eroding the opportunity to be admired by strangers. What makes most sense is symbolism: the brand’s refinement is passed by fiscal osmosis to the buyer. That’s the sense Club 1755 seeks to distil.

But it’s no owners’ club. Terms of entry are nebulous. Is it for favoured customers? Prospective buyers? Superfans? Yes and no. Designed as the secret hide-out of an idealised urbane collector who appreciates finery, the experience for most visitors will be aspirational. It’s not unlike how Playboy’s clubs were pitched for its imaginary audience rather than the magazine’s actual readership.

Adding to the appeal is the opportunity to buy into history. Lore lards everything. Staff, when not talking about archives and milestones, will explain the thinking behind each artwork and the provenance of every bottle on the bar. No visitor will be more than a moment away from something glossily apolitical to talk about. It reminded me a little of Games Workshop, the home of tabletop fantasy gaming, but with tourbillon and artisan spirits as conversational crutches rather than orcs.

In the watch servicing booth is a lever press and of course it has a story attached. This is a DIY perlage machine, used for impressing overlapping circles on metal dummies. Applied to a watch’s movement, it is said to catch specks of dust, which is the kind of vaguely plausible theory on which horology relies. More important is that it’s labour intensive, high risk and robotically tedious. My shot on the machine earns exaggerated praise that I accept graciously, while trying not to think about Marie Antoinette and the upper-class habit of making parlour games out of manual work.

The only high-end watch I’ve bought, in Harrods, for an unsuitable woman, cost a month’s salary. On beeping my card the salesman fished around a drawer for a plastic bag of identical watches and clipped one into a presentation box. The experience was grubbily transactional.

This, clearly, is better. For anyone who wants to express their personality with consumption, what’s on offer is a comprehensive proposition. My own watch collection doesn’t offer that benefit — though after 90 minutes of brand-adjacent small talk, I was thankful to be wearing the Braille face.