De Bethune DB25 Digitale

The De Bethune DB25 Digitale costs $128,600 excluding taxes and sits in the brand's permanent collection. It replaces the DB28 Digitale, which launched in 2014 at $115,200, as the watchmaker's standard-bearer for the jumping-hour complication it first built in 2006.

The case has moved from the 45mm DB28 platform to the smaller DB25 one: 42mm across, 11.9mm thick, polished grade 5 titanium with fixed, openworked lugs rather than the DB28's floating ones. The hour jumps instantaneously in a window at 12 o'clock, while the minutes drag round a disc set behind a curved opening lower on the dial, a change from the DB28's single top-mounted display that gives the layout a more symmetrical reading order.

The dial itself is built from concentric rings: a blued titanium disc with a random, wave-like guilloché at the centre, framed by a silvered sector with a hand-guilloché barleycorn motif, then a further blued titanium ring set with grey-gold stars. De Bethune counts 82 elements in the arrangement, and at its centre sits a moon rendered in palladium and flame-blued steel, keeping time with the lunar cycle to within one day every 1,112 years.

Underneath is the third generation of the in-house Calibre DB2144, hand-wound, 416 components, running at 28,800 vibrations per hour with a 5-day power reserve from a twin-barrel system. It carries several of the brand's own patents: the titanium balance wheel with grey-gold inserts, the De Bethune flat-terminal-curve balance spring, a silicon escape wheel and a blued triple pare-chute shock-absorbing system. The movement's barrel bridge now carries the same random guilloché pattern as the dial, finished by hand.

This is a watch for someone who already owns several and wants the one the brand treats as its own favourite. It is not a first serious watch and De Bethune has never priced it as one.