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oming up with a new watch isn’t a nine-to-five job for Thierry Stern, the president of watchmaking house Patek Philippe. It’s more of a 24-hour preoccupation. “I get new ideas when I’m sleeping,” he says. Even though he had to give up being head of the creative division when he took over the leadership role from his father in 2009, he says he’s still very hands-on with new timepieces. “To me, designing’s the best part and I don’t want to give it up.”
Quadruple Complication A showpiece of highly sophisticated micro-engineering, featuring a minute repeater, a tourbillon, an instantaneous perpetual calendar and a split-seconds or rattrapante (“catch up”) function, housed in an elegant white gold case. £1,060,000
He’s at Watches and Wonders, the international watch fair held in his home town of Geneva, to meet clients and collectors and also keep an eye on what competitors are up to. “Other watchmaking companies might complain, ‘We don’t know what to do. Everything has been done,’ ” he says. “But for me, creating new watches is a passion. It’s my favourite activity and I’m quite good at it.”
Founded in 1839, Patek Philippe is the last remaining family-run haute horlogerie house in Geneva. Thierry is the fourth generation of the Stern family that has run the business since 1932, with his grandfather Henri becoming president in 1958 followed by his father, Philippe, in 1993, now honorary president. The house is renowned for timepieces considered by connoisseurs and collectors to be among the world’s finest. They’re characterised by a refined and timeless aesthetic as well as trailblazing technical innovations, from chiming minute repeaters to perpetual calendars, which have earned the company more than 100 patents.
