F.P. Journe Octa Chronographe Ref. C Octa Rose Gold Salmon Dial

F.P. Journe made the Octa Chronographe from 2001 to 2008 and then replaced it with the Centigraphe. At launch it was the first automatic chronograph to combine a flyback with a large date on a reserve of over 120 hours, and roughly 313 examples were built between 2001 and 2008. That is a small number for a reference that stayed in the catalogue that long, and it is the reason the Octa Chronographe is scarcer today than the Octa references that outlived it. The chronograph was fitted into the existing Octa architecture rather than being given a movement of its own: the complication occupies roughly a millimetre of height inside a movement measuring 30 mm across and 5.7 mm deep, which is why the finished watch is no thicker than the time-and-date Octa references it sits beside.

The case is rose gold, measuring 38 mm across and standing 10.6 mm deep, on a leather strap. The dial is rose gold and whitened guilloché silver and the hands are blued steel. F.P. Journe pairs a gold dial plate with whitened guilloché silver across the Octa references, so the register ring and the apertures read against an engine-turned ground rather than a flat one, and the guilloché is applied to silver and then whitened rather than left bright.

The watch shows hours, minutes, small seconds, a large date, a power reserve indication and a flyback chronograph. A flyback returns the chronograph hand to zero and restarts it from a single press, where a conventional chronograph needs stop, reset and start in sequence. The large date is carried in an aperture rather than on a hand, and the power reserve is read on a sector rather than a disc. The Octa Chronographe therefore carries five indications besides the time on a 38 mm dial, which is the layout problem the reference is usually admired for solving.

This example belongs to the Octa Collection, built with the 18K rose gold mainplate F.P. Journe adopted in 2004. Its twin in the Brass Collection is the same reference built before that change, when the mainplate was rhodium-coated brass. Because the brass plates are rhodium-coated, both read silver through the back, and the two watches are identical on the outside — the movement metal is the whole of the difference and it is established by the production record.

The Octa Chronographe also appears in the Ruthenium Collection, for which F.P. Journe took five models from the end of the brass production and coated their dials and plates in ruthenium, in 99 pieces of each. That series is the clearest marker of where the brass era ended. For a plain Octa Chronographe the things worth establishing are the production year, which fixes the mainplate metal, and the case size, since F.P. Journe states this reference at 38 or 40 mm and the smaller case was retired in 2015.