This is the most complicated wristwatch in the current Rare Handcrafts selection and the only one where the dial and the complication describe the same idea. The subject is a planisphere, a projection of the heavens onto a flat surface, and the mechanism beneath it is a minute repeater combined with world time, so a watch that maps the world in its display carries a map of the sky on its face. The mechanical distinction of the reference goes further than the combination itself. This repeater chimes the local time rather than the reference time, which means the watch sounds the hour where the wearer actually is after the world time has been reset, and that is far harder to achieve than it sounds. The case is white gold and the reference leaves the collection in 2027.
The case measures 40.2 mm across and 11.49 mm thick, sitting between the 38 mm Rare Handcrafts case and the 42 mm repeater case in both dimensions, which is what housing a repeating mechanism and a world time system in one movement requires. The watch is supplied with interchangeable case backs, one solid and one in sapphire crystal, a feature shared only with the two 5278 references. The dial is enamel worked over hand engraving, so the celestial subject is cut into the metal before any colour is fired over it and the engraving supplies the structure that the enamel then colours rather than describing everything itself. White gold is the correct surround for a night sky and the only sensible choice, since a warm case would push a cold subject towards evening and lose the register the image depends on. The hands are white gold and faceted in a Southern Cross style, which is a detail worth noticing rather than passing over, because the hands themselves continue the celestial theme instead of being neutral pointers laid across it. Engraving beneath the enamel also gives the sky its structure in the metal rather than in the colour, so the constellations hold their positions in a layer that would survive even if the fired surface above them were lost.
The complication set is dense. A minute repeater sounds the hours, the quarters and the minutes on demand across two gongs of different pitch, and it is the most demanding mechanism the Manufacture assembles, regulated at the end by ear rather than by instrument because tone and the spacing between strikes cannot be written into a specification. World time displays all twenty-four zones simultaneously, with a twenty-four hour indication and a day and night reading for every one of them, so the wearer can see at a glance not only what time it is elsewhere but whether it is a reasonable hour there. The two systems are linked by the local time strike. In most chiming travel watches the repeater sounds a fixed reference time regardless of where the watch has been set, which makes the complication useless the moment the owner crosses a zone. Here the strike follows the local display, so the watch remains truthful wherever it is, and coupling a chiming train to a world time mechanism without either interfering with the other is the reason this reference exists. There is no date and no running seconds, which on a dial already carrying twenty-four cities and a celestial map is the only remaining restraint available, and Patek Philippe has taken it. The absence also serves the strike directly, since every additional indication adds components to a movement that is already carrying a chiming train, and a repeater is more sensitive than any other complication to what is built around it.
Three chiming references appear in the current selection against twenty-eight that indicate hours and minutes only, and this is the most complicated of the three. The two 5278 references are repeaters without further indication, one carrying an enamel allegory of music and the other an electric guitar in wood marquetry, both in rose gold at 42 mm. This reference is the only one of the three in white gold and the only one to combine chiming with a second complication. It is also the only reference in the entire current wristwatch selection where the decorative subject and the mechanical function describe the same territory, since a planisphere and a world time display are both attempts to render the whole of something on a surface too small for it. Every other reference in the programme puts a decorative dial in front of a movement that has nothing to do with the image above it. It is also the only reference in the selection where the hands participate in the subject rather than crossing it, which is a small decision that follows from the same thinking.
This reference is bought by collectors who want the two hardest things Patek Philippe does in one watch and are prepared for the compromises that come with it. A repeater with world time is thicker and larger than either complication would be alone, and the dial is busier than any other in the Rare Handcrafts selection because it has to accommodate twenty-four cities as well as an engraved and enamelled sky. Anyone looking for the restraint that defines the rest of the programme should look elsewhere in it. What this offers instead is coherence, since the subject, the display and the strike all address the same problem of locating a person in time and place, and that unity is rare in a collection where the dial and the movement usually pursue separate ambitions. The commercial terms are unchanged: one catalogue year, an exit in 2027, no repetition, and a population determined by the calendar rather than by a declared edition. Chiming watches with a decorative dial are scarce in any year, and one that also carries world time and a local strike narrows the field to a degree that makes comparison with anything else in the collection difficult.
