The Optimum is the only watch in the collection built around an escapement Journe designed himself. The EBHP, his high-performance bi-axial escapement, uses two escape wheels to deliver a direct impulse to the balance in both directions, and it sits behind a remontoir d'egalite and two mainspring barrels in a movement assembled specifically to test how stable a wristwatch rate can be made. This is the 18K 6N gold version with a 5N gold dial, offered at 40 and 42 mm. It arrived in 2012 and remains in production. Nothing else in the collection carries the EBHP, and the movement was built for this reference alone.
Gold on gold makes the dial the warmest the model is offered with and the least likely to give anything away. A solid 5N gold plate carries a whitened guilloche silver register for the time, another for the dead beat seconds and an indication of the remaining power reserve, each let into the plate and framed by a polished steel ring. Against a warm ground the silver reads as texture rather than as contrast, which is why the Optimum in gold looks like an ordinary dress watch from any distance. Nothing is printed outside the registers. The case is 18K 6N gold at 40 or 42 mm, polished, with short lugs and a narrow bezel, and the whole watch is thinner than the movement inside it suggests. Through the sapphire back the reason for that becomes clear, since the escapement and the remontoir are laid out beside the barrels rather than stacked over them. The bridges carry Cotes de Geneve over circular graining, the screw heads are polished with chamfered slots, and the two escape wheels sit in plain view where a lever would normally be, which is the only place on the watch where any of this is visible. There is no rotor, since the watch is hand wound, which leaves the whole layout open. Journe has never hidden a movement he was pleased with.
A conventional Swiss lever escapement transfers energy to the balance through a pallet fork, which means two impulses per oscillation delivered indirectly and a set of contact surfaces that need lubrication. The EBHP removes the fork. Two escape wheels act directly on the balance roller, one in each direction, so the impulse arrives without an intermediary and the escapement runs dry rather than depending on oil that degrades over a service interval. Feeding it is a remontoir d'egalite, a small spring rewound once a second by the going train, which delivers identical force to the escapement regardless of what the barrels are doing. The dead beat seconds hand is the visible output of that arrangement rather than a separate complication. Removing the lever also removes the oil. A conventional escapement depends on lubricant between the pallet stones and the escape wheel teeth, and that lubricant degrades from the day the watch leaves the manufacture, which is most of the reason service intervals exist at all. Direct impulse escapements have been attempted since the eighteenth century for precisely that reason and almost none have reached production, because they are difficult to make reliable. The EBHP is Journe's answer to that problem and it is the part of the watch that took the longest to finish. Two barrels sit alongside, mounted in parallel so the force curve is flatter before the remontoir acts on it at all.
Journe built the Optimum after twenty years of solving the same problem in pieces. The remontoir appeared in his first tourbillon wristwatch in 1991, the dead beat seconds followed in 2004, and the two barrel arrangement runs through the Souveraine collection. The Optimum is where all of it was put in one movement and given a new escapement to work with. It carries no complication at all, which makes it the hardest reference in the range to explain and the one most likely to be overlooked by anybody reading a specification sheet. Both case sizes and both precious metals have been offered since it was introduced. Its standing has moved considerably since. In 2012 the Optimum read as a technical exercise that would find a narrow audience, and it sat behind the tourbillons and the Resonance for years while collectors worked out what it was. That has reversed, and it is now among the first references mentioned when people are asked what this house does that nobody else does. Nothing about the watch changed to cause that; the understanding simply caught up, which is the usual pattern with a movement whose merits cannot be demonstrated across a counter. Both sizes remain available in gold and in platinum, and the dial metal follows the case rather than being chosen separately.
This suits a buyer who has understood that the interesting part of a Journe is what happens between the mainspring and the balance. In gold with a gold dial the watch says nothing about that from the front, which is either the appeal or the frustration depending on temperament. The dead beat seconds is the only outward clue and it is the detail owners find themselves watching. Both case sizes are available and the choice should be made on the wrist. As a current reference the obstacle is allocation, and servicing goes to the manufacture, since almost nobody outside it has worked on this escapement. That is worth establishing before buying rather than afterwards, since a watch with an unusual escapement and no service record is a longer proposition than a standard one. Everything else about ownership is undemanding: it winds by hand, there is nothing to correct, and the power reserve indication tells the owner when to do the only thing the watch asks of anybody. Nothing about the model has changed since 2012 and nothing is expected to.
