Roger Dubuis presents Excalibur Superbia the ultimate watch for those embracing excess and risk-taking; two of the key values of the House.
Excalibur Superbia is crafted in palladium-enriched white gold and set with a huge number of 600 precious white diamonds and blue sapphires. This offers a truly extravagant housing for Roger Dubuis iconic signature calibre: a brand-new Double Flying Tourbillon movement, the RD108SQ.
This highly complicated movement pays tribute to the house’s capabilities of creating movements that few can achieve as it becomes the iconic signature of the house.
What makes this watch truly special is that every stone set on the flange, the bezel, the case and the crown is tetrahedron shaped and assembled with an invisible setting on curved surfaces. The hardest way to set a stone, an invisible setting becomes nearly impossible when required on a curved surface.
This truly unique design marks the first time any jeweller or watchmaker has dared to set a piece in this way. The complexity of this design is hard to imagine and took master craftsmen at the House’s Geneva Manufacture hundreds of hours to complete. To complicate matters further, each and every glittering stone in the Excalibur Superbia is a tetrahedron, a shape requiring boundless cutting skill as its extreme thinness greatly increases the risk of breaking. Not only did every stone have to be tetrahedron-shaped, the pattern was designed so that all 238 stones featured in the case of the Excalibur Superbia has a different shape and is thus singular.
But in true Roger Dubuis style impossible is never an option and the watchmaker has defied the odds to create this special piece.
The element the Excalibur Superbia comes with the grooving – the last step required to complete the invisible setting with the previously perfectly triangulated stones. This is so hard to do on a tetrahedron stone that it took each gem setter an average of 30 minutes to do a single groove, corresponding to 900 hours for this operation alone on all three sides of the 600 diamonds, plus 420 hours to set the case and bezel – and that’s without even counting the stone-cutting! The entire process takes about three times longer than the same case set with baguette-cut stones.
Simple and straight, the lines of this exceptional piece of artistry are strongly reminiscent of the spatial art forms favoured by interior design artist Kaz Shirane with whom the brand that dares to be different shares a number of characteristics – not least from a visual perspective.
Kaz Shirane
Shirane says of the watch: “Roger Dubuis and I share the same vision: we create incredible pieces that make people feel they are the protagonists. For me, the Roger Dubuis Superbia watch is like a time machine that can take us to an extraordinary world in an instant. I always want to create such space in my artworks. The elaborate craftsmanship is, of course, absolutely wonderful. But beyond that, what struck me the most is that it is a very artistic piece: its distinctive design catches the light so beautifully and can be noticed even from afar.”
This unique watch is for the daring; those who live life to the excess with the greatest intensity.
