The Starwheel is the oldest idea in the current Code 11.59 selection and the least conventional, and it is the only reference here that does not tell the time with a pointing hand. Three discs, each carrying numerals, rotate across a track spanning the upper portion of the dial. The disc bearing the current hour travels along the track, and the position of its numeral against the minute scale gives the time, so the hour is read as a moving element rather than as a hand pointing at a fixed index. The mechanism descends from seventeenth-century clockmaking, and this is the black ceramic version with a red dial, made as a limited edition. Audemars Piguet has returned to the wandering hours display periodically since the early 1990s rather than treating it as a single experiment, and each revival has been small. That intermittent history is part of why the mechanism is associated with the house at all, since very few makers have used it in a wristwatch more than once.
The case is black ceramic at 41 mm in the Code 11.59 construction, round from above and octagonal through the middle, with hollowed lugs welded to the case band. Executing that architecture in ceramic is harder than in metal, since the material cannot be corrected after machining and every transition between brushed and polished surfaces has to be reached in the tooling. The dial is red and shimmering, with a rhodium-toned centre wheel carrying black aluminium discs and a red 60 marking the top of the minute track at twelve o clock. Aluminium is the right material for the discs because they are rotating components and mass matters, and black on red is the pairing that keeps the numerals legible against a bright ground. The strap is black textured rubber with calfskin lining and red stitching, fitted with a white gold pin buckle, and a second strap is supplied. Red is also a difficult colour to hold on a shimmering dial, since the finish scatters light and a saturated red can read as orange at some angles and brown at others. Keeping it consistent across the surface while the discs rotate over it is a harder finishing problem than a flat colour would present. Matching the red at twelve to the dial ground across a shimmering surface is the detail that shows whether the work was done properly.
The function set is hours, minutes and centre seconds, which understates what the watch is doing. A wandering hours display requires the three discs to be driven and indexed so that each arrives at the start of the track precisely as its hour begins, and the transition has to be clean rather than gradual or the reading becomes ambiguous at the change. A centre seconds hand runs conventionally over the lower portion of the dial. There is no date, and on a display of this kind an aperture would have nowhere to sit that did not interfere with the disc track or the seconds sweep. The discs also have to be finished on their visible faces to the same standard as the dial, since they are permanently on view and pass across the most looked-at part of the display, which is not true of most rotating components in a watch. Aluminium also has to take that finish without the weight a heavier metal would add, since every gram on a rotating disc is load the movement has to drive continuously.
Two Starwheel references appear in the current selection, both in black ceramic at 41 mm, and they are separated by dial. This is the red version and it is the limited one. The alternative uses black aventurine with rose gold-toned elements, which is a considerably darker and quieter watch. Elsewhere in the collection the Code 11.59 runs to conventional time-only references, chronographs, tourbillons and chiming watches, none of which depart from pointing hands. The Starwheel is the collection only alternative display.
The buyer for this reference wants a watch that is read differently, and that is a specific taste rather than a general one. A wandering hours display takes a moment longer to read than a conventional dial, and owners either find that engaging or find it an obstacle. Red is the more assertive of the two dials on offer and the limitation makes it the scarcer, so the reference combines an unusual complication with a defined production run and a colour that will be noticed. Collectors who arrive here have usually already decided that a conventional dial is not what they want. The limitation matters more here than it would on a conventional reference, since the wandering hours display appears only intermittently in the catalogue and a limited run of it is a narrow window within an already narrow one. A buyer who wants a Starwheel and wants it limited has this reference and no alternative, which is a cleaner scarcity argument than most limited editions can make, since the underlying complication is itself uncommon rather than a standard watch produced in a capped run. It is also worth placing the reference against the collection it belongs to. The Code 11.59 was introduced as an entirely new case architecture rather than as an extension of an existing family, and it was received cautiously before the dials and the finishing were reworked. A limited Starwheel in black ceramic with a red dial is about as far from a cautious watch as the collection goes, and it is one of the references demonstrating what the case can carry once that conservatism is set aside. The wandering hours mechanism, the ceramic construction, the aluminium discs and the colour are each unusual on their own, and the combination exists nowhere else in the catalogue. That is the argument for it in a sentence.
