The Optimum is the watch Journe built when he stopped adding complications and started removing sources of error. It carries a remontoir that releases energy once a second, a regulating assembly that runs without any lubrication at all, and a dead beat seconds hand placed on the back of the movement rather than the front, where the owner can see it and nobody else can. Everything in it exists to serve the rate. This is the boutique execution in 18K 6N gold with a blackened dial, offered at 40 and 42 mm and no longer made. It is the least understood watch in the collection.
The dial is deliberately quiet given what sits behind it. Hours and minutes are pushed off to one side in a whitened guilloche silver sub-dial held down by a screwed steel ring, with a small seconds counter opposite, and the rest of the plate is blackened gold with almost nothing printed on it. The remontoir shows through an opening near the top, so the one visible sign of the mechanism is the piece of it that moves once a second. The case is 18K 6N gold, offered at 40 or 42 mm and under ten millimeters deep, polished, with the knurled crown the house uses everywhere. Against a dark plate the two silver discs and the single aperture are the entire composition. From two feet away it looks like a plain two-register dress watch, which is exactly what a chronometer should look like and almost never does. The blackened plate does something specific on this reference. On the standard Optimum the gold dial is warm and the remontoir opening tends to disappear into it; blackening the plate turns that opening into the brightest thing on the watch, which puts the emphasis where the design intends it. Numerals and the minute track are kept light for the same reason. The hands are finished to hold rather than to shine. Everything about the front of this watch is arranged to keep attention on one small moving part.
Three ideas are stacked in this movement and each one addresses the same problem. The first is the remontoir, a small secondary spring rewound once a second by the mainspring, which means the regulating organ receives the same push regardless of how much energy remains in the barrels. The second is the regulating assembly itself, built with titanium wheels and running dry, since oil degrades over time and a mechanism that never needed it will not drift as the lubricant ages. Journe drew on eighteenth century work by Breguet for the principle. The third is the dead beat seconds, driven from the remontoir and displayed through the sapphire back on a large hand of its own, so the watch tells the owner directly whether the constant force is doing its job. Two barrels supply the energy. Nothing on the watch is decorative. What all of that adds up to is a watch designed around consistency rather than around a single impressive figure. A tourbillon averages out errors caused by position; a remontoir removes errors caused by falling energy; running dry removes the errors that appear as oil ages. Journe has built watches that address each of those separately over the years, and the Optimum is the one where he addressed them together. It is also the only reference where the most interesting display faces the wrist, since the large dead beat hand on the back is the direct readout of whether the constant force system is working as intended.
The Optimum arrived in 2012 and sits at the technical end of the collection without any of the visual signals that usually accompany that position. There is no tourbillon and nothing skeletonized, and a casual observer would take it for a Chronometre Souverain with a slightly busier back. That is precisely why it is overlooked. Within the house it is the answer to a question Journe has been working on since the beginning, which is how close a mechanical watch can be brought to a constant rate, and it draws together the remontoir from the tourbillons, the dead beat seconds from the Resonance and the oil-free regulating work he had been developing separately. The boutique execution in gold with a blackened plate narrows an already small audience, since the reference was never made in the numbers the simpler watches were. Its position in the market has shifted slowly. For years the Optimum was the watch people passed over on the way to a tourbillon, on the grounds that it looks like a time-only watch. That has begun to change as the collection has become better documented and as buyers have worked further into it, and the reference now attracts the sort of collector who has already bought the obvious things twice. The boutique executions have followed the same curve. A gold case with a blackened plate was a hard sell on a watch nobody could identify, and it is now one of the more sought configurations.
This is a watch for someone who already knows the collection well enough to want the one nobody asks about. It gives away nothing on the wrist and requires an explanation to be appreciated, which is either the appeal or the reason to buy something else. What it offers is the most thoroughly considered rate mechanism the house has built, in a case that reads as a plain dress watch, with the interesting half of it facing the wrist. In gold with a dark dial it is warmer than the platinum versions and the aperture near the top stands out more. As a discontinued boutique piece the questions are condition and documentation, and the movement side is worth examining closely, since the dead beat hand and the remontoir are the two things that should be seen working before any purchase. The dial side is easier to assess and less likely to be a problem, but a blackened plate shows handling marks that a gold one hides, so it deserves a close look under a light rather than a glance across a counter.
