The color took several months to arrive at. F.P. Journe's dialmakers developed the Havana tone in house, working toward a specific warm brown by combining gold and ruthenium and adjusting the formula repeatedly until the shade came right, and the result is a dial that has no equivalent elsewhere in the catalog. It is applied over a guilloche silver plate worked in the Clous de Paris pattern, so the brown sits on a field of small pyramids rather than on a flat surface, and it is fitted here into a platinum case measuring 40 mm across. The layout is the standard Automatique Lune arrangement of central hours and minutes, small seconds at 4:30, a large date, the power reserve at 9 o'clock and a moon phase. It has since been withdrawn from the collection.
Brown is a genuinely difficult color to put on a watch dial, and the great majority of attempts at it end up looking like a fault rather than a decision. What rescues this one is that the tone across it is not uniform. Because the guilloche is cut before the color goes on, the Clous de Paris pyramids hold the shade at different depths across their facets, so the dial reads darker down in the recesses and lighter on the flats, and it shifts continuously as the wrist moves, which is what keeps a brown surface alive rather than flat. Journe then fitted hands in an ivory-colored steel rather than blued or rhodium plated ones, drawn in the teardrop shape the manufacture uses across this reference, and those pale hands against the warm ground are the reason the time remains readable at a glance. The numerals are printed rather than applied, which keeps them out of the way of the surface they sit on. In platinum the case is the cooler of the two options offered, and it puts a hard white metal around a soft brown face, which is much the less obvious of the two pairings and the more interesting for it. A gold case agrees with the dial; a platinum one argues with it.
The beat rate is worth pausing on, because 21,600 alternations per hour is slow by modern standards and the choice was deliberate. A faster balance, running at 28,800 or 36,000 alternations per hour, is less disturbed by the movement of a wrist and generally holds a better rate over the short term, which is why most modern manufactures went in that direction. It also consumes rather more energy, wears its pivots faster and demands considerably more from the lubrication. Journe wanted five days of properly regulated running out of a single barrel, and every increase in frequency would have eaten directly into that figure. Running at 3 Hz, with a large free-sprung balance of 10.1 mm carrying high inertia to compensate for the slower rate, obtains the stability from mass rather than from speed, which is a trade rather than a compromise. It is the older approach, and it is the one that suits a long-reserve automatic. The rest of the calibre 1300.3 runs to 271 parts and 36 jewels on plates and bridges of solid 18K rose gold, with about 160 hours of autonomy of which the first 120 are underwritten as chronometric. Frequency is one of the few specifications where a higher number is not automatically the better answer.
Journe makes his own dials, which is a good deal rarer in this industry than most buyers assume, and it explains how a color like this one comes about at all. The great majority of watch manufactures, including some very grand ones indeed, buy their dials from specialist suppliers and choose from whatever those suppliers are able to produce, which means that the dial ends up being specified rather than genuinely developed. Having the capability in house changes entirely what is possible to attempt. A shade that requires months of iteration, mixing gold with ruthenium and testing the result repeatedly against a guilloche surface until it comes right, is not something a manufacture commissions from outside, because no supplier would carry the development effort for a production run this small. It is also why the manufacture's dials are so consistently identifiable across the range: the diamond-tooled numerals, the whitened silver plates, the Clous de Paris fields and the Havana tone all come out of the same workshop, working to a single sensibility rather than to a brief handed over to an outside supplier and returned months later. The Havana dial is probably the clearest single demonstration anywhere in the catalog of what that vertical integration actually buys a customer.
This is a watch for the buyer who has looked at the white and the gold dial versions and wanted something with rather more character than either. Brown is a commitment, and it narrows what the watch can be worn alongside in a way that a silver dial never does, but it is also the most distinctive execution the Automatique Lune ever received and the one people actually remember. The platinum case makes it the more formal of the two Havana pairings, and the harder of the two to mistake for anything else. The reference has been withdrawn, so the secondary market is the only route to one, and Havana dials do appear a good deal less frequently than the standard executions do. The dial is the thing to inspect above all: check the color for evenness across the whole surface under good light, since an unevenly faded or marked Havana cannot be matched or replaced by anybody. Then run the reference's usual checks: the date jumping cleanly at midnight, the reserve indication working across the length of its scale, and the moon advancing correctly through a complete cycle.
