Each F.P. Journe boutique gets one of these when it turns ten. The Centigraphe Anniversaire was introduced in 2016 by the Tokyo shop and produced until 2023, and every example is numbered and followed by the name of the city it was sold in: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Geneva, Paris, New York, Miami, Los Angeles. Ten pieces per boutique, except Hong Kong, which had twenty. The watch was available only in the shop celebrating the anniversary, which means each city has its own small population and no example exists outside that structure. It is a 40 mm polished titanium case with a gold crown and rocker and a ruthenium dial.
The material combination is the reason this watch looks unlike any other Centigraphe. The case is polished titanium at 40 mm and just over ten millimeters deep, which is unusual on its own, since Journe uses titanium almost exclusively in the sports line and almost never polished. Against that, the crown and the rocker are 18K 6N gold, so the two controls on the watch are the only warm elements on it. The dial is a single disc of gold coated in ruthenium, dark and semi-skeletonized, with the three chronograph counters cut in sapphire. The small hands are red lacquered titanium and the hour numerals sit in a subdued orange that agrees with them and with the gold. The strap is burgundy alligator. Every color on the watch was chosen against every other one. Polished titanium is the detail that will confuse anybody who knows the collection. The metal is normally used matte and in the sports line, where it is chosen for weight; here it is polished to a shine and put in a 40 mm dress case, which makes it read as steel until it is picked up and turns out to weigh almost nothing. That surprise is the whole point of the material choice. The gold crown and rocker sharpen it further, since the two things a hand touches are the only precious metal on the piece. The case measures just over ten millimeters deep.
The mechanism is the standard Centigraphe and none of it was altered for the anniversary. Three counters read elapsed time from a hundredth of a second to ten minutes, each on its own train drawn from the center of the mainspring so the chronograph is isolated from the timekeeping. The hundredth of a second sweeps its dial once per second and stops wherever it is asked to, including between divisions. The rocker at two o'clock starts, stops and zeroes everything from one control, which is the arrangement Journe patented and the reason the case band carries no pushers. Time is shown from the center. A share of the profit from every Centigraphe sold goes to the ICM in Paris, a commitment the house has kept since 2007 and which applies to these as much as to the standard versions. The scales are printed in red, with a black tachymeter track around the outside that converts a kilometer time into a speed, and against a ruthenium dial both read considerably brighter than they do on the silvered version. Ruthenium is a coating rather than a paint, applied over a gold disc, and it shifts toward brown or blue as the light moves rather than staying flat. Journe has used it on a handful of limited series across twenty years and on almost nothing else, which is part of why the Anniversaire looks like a different watch rather than a different dial.
The anniversary program says something about how this house sells. Most makers mark a shop opening with a party; Journe marked each tenth birthday with a numbered watch available in that shop only, which turns a retail milestone into a collecting category. Because each city ran to ten pieces, or twenty in Hong Kong, the total across the whole program is small and the geography is fixed, so an owner in Miami cannot buy the Los Angeles version and vice versa. The series also outlived the watch it is based on. The regular Centigraphe Souverain was discontinued in 2018, which left the Anniversaire as the only version of the model outside the LineSport collection until it too ended in 2023. Seven years is a long run for a watch tied to individual shop birthdays, and it worked because the boutique network kept reaching the milestone one city at a time. Tokyo and Hong Kong both turned ten in 2016, Geneva followed in 2017, Paris in 2018, and New York, Miami and Los Angeles afterwards. Each release was a single evening in a single shop. That structure means the total population is knowable and small, and it also means the watches are distributed geographically rather than by demand, so a collector in one city has no natural route to the version from another.
Collecting these is a geography problem rather than a market one. Each city version is its own tiny population, they were sold to people the shops already knew, and they surface individually and rarely. That makes provenance more interesting than usual, since the city name on the watch tells you where it started its life. In wearing terms it is the most comfortable Centigraphe, since 40 mm of titanium weighs very little and the gold is confined to two small controls. As a discontinued reference the questions are condition, papers and the state of the rocker, and the chronograph should be exercised through several cycles before committing. The city name is also the first thing to verify, since it is what distinguishes one example from another and it is the detail a casual listing is most likely to omit. Beyond that the watch is easy to live with. Forty millimeters of titanium on an alligator strap is about as comfortable as a chronograph gets, and there is nothing on the dial that requires learning.
