Bring a Loupe The Aussie Edit - A Rolex Queen Midas, A Stone-Dial Piaget & A Whole Lotta Gold

A couple of weeks back, our very own Nick Kenyon dropped into the Bakhache boutique in Melbourne’s Block Arcade to check out some extraordinary 70s and 80s precious metal Piaget watches - check out his photo report here. I don’t know about you, but seeing the stone dials, sculpted gold and effortless cool of these imaginative watches got me hungry for more. So if you’re in the same boat as me, this month's Aussie Bring A Loupe might be dangerous to the bank balance. 

As the global watch collecting cognoscenti begins to turn its nose away from steel sports watches to late 20th century, historically important and seriously rare jewellery watches, the Australian market has been slow to keep up, yet more local collectors are coming round to the charm of these pieces every day - and learning first hand just how scarce they actually are. So to save you the hunt, I’ve rounded up some of the most interesting, avant-garde, precious metal 1970s and 80s watches on the market in Australia today.

Is there a better combination than green and white gold? Possibly only when that green is natural jade, and that’s exactly what this Piaget ref. 9706 brings to the table.

Behind that jade dial is an ultra-thin Piaget manually wound movement, cased in a slim white gold case with a bark-finished bezel and polished hour markers that allow the dial to remain perfectly sparse, sans the Piaget and ‘Swiss’ signatures that pop in white. It’s integrated into a white gold bracelet in a matching bark finish that wraps around to a hidden clasp with a seriously cool Piaget ‘P’ on it.

When shopping around for integrated bracelet precious metal jewellery watches like this, you’ll often see them listed as ‘ladies watches’ - don’t pay any attention to that. Watches are unisex, and Piaget’s designers in the 70s knew what they were doing when they cased these up with a diameter of 24mm.

Any larger and its proportions would be ungainly; it’s perfectly restrained to still allow the wearer to move silently even when strapped up with a white gold and jade Piaget on the wrist, and the drape of the bracelet and its wide width mean you wouldn’t want it any larger on the wrist. It’s available from Harrington and Co in Brisbane, and you can check it out here.

Since neo-vintage jewellery watches have started to take off in recent years, the AP Cobra has been something of a starchild. In its day, it was the most expensive watch line made by Audemars Piguet (higher than the Royal Oak) with an integrated bead bracelet whose design blends around the case. It’s closer to a watch integrated into a bracelet than a bracelet integrated into a watch.

This yellow gold example's bead bracelet also features a horizontal engraving finish across the bracelet, which blends across the case bands, topped off with a clean lemon dial with diamond markers. Tasty stuff.

There’s a huge number of Cobra variants with different metals, dials, finishes, handsets and diamond settings (including diamond-set hands on some references!) and in the pantheon of Cobras, this example is one of the more understated ones - as understated as an AP Cobra can be. It’s ultra-thin with an in-house quartz movement inside, and don’t be put off by the 29mm diameter. On paper it’s small, but on the wrist, these integrated Cobras carry some substantial weight.

This one is up for grabs from Hourstance in Sydney here at an asking price of A$19,000. Prices have been steadily rising on Cobras, but next to the equivalent year's matching-spec Royal Oak, they’re a steal.

After seeing the delectable Piagets in Nick’s article about the Bakhache collection, I moseyed on over to their site to take a look at the range, pleasantly surprised to see a big range of other watches that boast a design off the beaten path. The one that especially caught my eye was this yellow gold Omega in a rather handsome tonneau case that houses a very thin manually wound movement.

As was fashionable for the era, the bracelet texture continues over the dial, and it’s inset with a ring of set diamonds with the simplest, pencil-thin black minute and hour handset imaginable. That contrast of such an opulent and dramatic dial, finish and case shape mixed with the sparse handset really rings my bell. The case is only 25mm wide but with a lug-to-lug of 29mm and a big gold bracelet wrapping round the wrist, trust me - it’s still a statement watch.

The only downside of this one? That gold bracelet needs to be cut to be sized; common for the time but a challenge nonetheless. This one will fit a wrist up to 170mm. It’s with Bakhache here.

The Rolex Midas range was made in a litany of case shapes, most famously the crown-on-the-left asymmetric design inspired by the Pantheon. This isn’t that case shape, instead a symmetrical one with a hexagonal motif, though it’s still a Gérald Genta creation that bears all the design hallmarks that make the Midas in all its guises such a cracking watch.

Dating from around the mid-70s, this white gold example has a hexagonal dial inside the hexagonal case that wraps the wrist with thick, wide white gold links. The Midas range was made in three sizes: King, Queen and Princess (of which only around 20 were made) and for most wrists, the Queen Midas is actually the sweet spot. 24mm across, but with those monolithic links draping the wrist, it wears more like a bracelet than a watch, sized to not overwhelm, but it’s still a brick.

It’s up for grabs from The Vintage Hour, whom we actually covered in last month's edition of The Aussie Edit as well, but seeing that white gold Midases don’t hit the market every day (let alone in Australia), it’s worth the double dip. You can check it out here.