Hands-On: The Arnold & Son UTTE Skeleton Tourbillon,
By Jack Forster
Arnold & Son introduced the UTTE Tourbillon just three years ago, at which time it was one of the thinnest hand-wound tourbillons in the world. Although there are other extra-flat/ultra-thin tourbillons out there that are slimmer, Arnold & Son says this is the thinnest skeletonized tourbillon currently in production – and as far as I can tell, that’s absolutely right.
The standard version of the UTTE Tourbillon is an interesting design in its own right, and it came along at an interesting time in Arnold & Son’s history. The company was acquired by Citizen in 2012, along with the movement manufacturer La Joux Perret (both were owned by Prothor, a holding company) and there has been a significant change in the aesthetics of Arnold & Son’s watches since. In a relatively short period of time, the watches underwent a major design overhaul. The somewhat scattered and occasionally cluttered, or excessively decorative, designs of the brand’s earlier watches was replaced with a much more unified design philosophy overall, with an unusually coherent design vocabulary. The UTTE Tourbillon was one of the first Arnold & Son watches to express this new approach – technical and very clean, but with a kind of spare elegance of line and care in composition that underscores the technical features of the watches without straying into the pointlessly ornate.
Arnold & Son still does some very decorative watches – the Perpetual Moon is a good example – but in general, its watches have become less decorative for decoration’s sake, and more an exercise in well-integrated movement design and overall aesthetics; you really get the feeling that the watches are built from the ground up around the movements. A great example of this is the Golden Wheel, which is a modern take on the very old wandering hours complication. For this sort of thing to work, the movements have to have a certain level of fineness in execution, and in that respect La Joux Perret (via Arnold & Son) is doing some really great work indeed.
The UTTE Tourbillon is a pretty satisfying watch. The only gripe a really stubborn stickler for horological purism might have with it is the name – UTTE stands for Ultra-Thin Tourbillon …read more
