Brown on red gold is the agreeable version of the Havana, and whether that is a recommendation depends entirely on what a buyer wants from the watch. The dial is the tone F.P. Journe's own dialmakers spent months developing, a warm brown reached by combining gold with ruthenium and adjusting the formula repeatedly until it came right, laid over a guilloche silver plate worked in the Clous de Paris pattern. Put it in a case of 18K 6N gold and the two warm tones agree with one another, producing something considerably softer than the same dial in platinum. The layout is the standard Automatique Lune: central hours and minutes, small seconds at 4:30, a large date, the power reserve at 9 o'clock and a moon phase. The case measures 40 mm across, and the reference has since been withdrawn from the collection.
Gold and brown sit close enough on the spectrum that the watch reads as a single warm object rather than as a dial inside a case, and the effect is either handsome or monotonous depending on the light and on the viewer. In daylight the 6N case throws a distinctly red cast while the Havana dial holds a deeper, browner tone, and the two separate cleanly. Under artificial light they converge, and the watch can lose the boundary between case and dial altogether. Journe seems to have anticipated this, because the guilloche underneath is doing quite a lot of work to prevent it. The Clous de Paris field breaks the dial into small pyramids that hold the color at different depths, so even when the overall tone matches the case the surface is visibly textured where the metal is smooth, and the two remain distinguishable by finish when they are no longer distinguishable by shade. Ivory-colored steel hands in the manufacture's teardrop shape provide the only genuine contrast anywhere on the face, and the numerals are printed rather than applied so they sit into the surface rather than above it. The case is 10.6 mm tall with a sapphire crystal set into the back, showing a movement whose rose gold plates are themselves a third warm metal on a watch that already has two.
The rotor is made in 22K gold rather than the 18K used for the plates, and the reason for that is density rather than decoration. A winding rotor works by inertia: the more mass it carries and the further that mass sits from the pivot, the more energy it delivers to the barrel for a given movement of the wrist. Space inside a watch case is fixed, so the only way to increase that mass without making the movement thicker is to use a denser material for it. Gold alloys become denser as the proportion of pure gold rises, which makes 22K appreciably heavier than 18K for the same volume, and that is why the higher alloy is used for the rotor and the lower one everywhere else, where hardness matters more than weight. Journe compounded the advantage by moving the rotor off-center rather than pivoting it centrally, which puts the whole of the mass on one side and away from the axis. The combination is efficient enough that roughly 274 counter-clockwise turns cover a full day of running. The calibre 1300.3 around it holds 271 parts and 36 jewels, beats at 21,600 alternations per hour, and offers about 160 hours of autonomy with the first 120 underwritten as chronometric.
Journe names dials rather than numbering them, and the habit says something about how the manufacture thinks about variation. Most manufactures describe a dial by its color and finish and leave it at that, so a catalog lists a slate dial, a silver opaline, an anthracite sunburst. Journe has Havana, and Nacre, and the Black Label, and the Boutique blue, each of them a name attached to a specific development rather than a description of an outcome. The distinction is not merely linguistic. A named dial implies that the color was arrived at rather than simply selected, that somebody spent months working on the formula, and that the result belongs to this particular manufacture rather than being available from a supplier to anybody who asks for it. It also means the variants acquire identities of their own within the collecting community, and are discussed as distinct watches rather than as color options on one reference. The Havana in particular has developed a following out of all proportion to the number of them made, which is generally what happens when a thing is given a name that people can actually use in conversation. Nobody ever formed an attachment to a slate sunburst.
This is the warmer and more approachable of the two Havana executions, and it suits a collector who wants the dial to be the reason for the watch. Gold and brown together read as autumnal and slightly old-fashioned in the best sense, and the combination flatters most skin tones in a way that platinum and brown does not quite manage. Against that, it is the less striking of the two, and anyone who wants the Havana tone to announce itself should be looking at the platinum version instead. The reference has been out of production for some years, so the secondary market is the only source, and Havana examples surface less often than the silver and gold dial versions. Inspect the dial closely for evenness of color right across its surface, since this particular shade cannot be matched or replaced by anyone and a marked example simply stays marked for good. Beyond that the usual checks apply: the date jumping cleanly and instantaneously at midnight, the reserve indication travelling the full length of its scale, and the moon advancing correctly through a complete cycle.
