Vintage Watches Why This Early Roger Dubuis Is Worth Knowing About

This same line of thinking applies to the Roger Dubuis Hommage Condottieri from the mid-'90s that you see here, and yet it's also so much more. You can feel the difference when you pick it up, put it on, and flip through its plush box and papers. It's the snow-white enamel dial; the massive, reworked vintage pocket watch movement; hell, it's the box and oversized observatory certification papers that come with it.

When Dubuis launched his own brand in the mid-'90s, the Hommage Condottieri was his statement piece. After working as a watchmaker for 40 years (and at Patek Philippe for 20 of those), Dubuis didn't need to hide behind fancy complications or gimmicky designs to make a statement. Nope, one of the best time-only watches on the market would say more than enough.

Roger Dubuis began his watchmaking career at Longines in the 1950s. I can just imagine the young watchmaker toiling away in the after-sales department to repair the beautiful 13ZN chronographs of Longines' golden era. Soon, he moved on to Patek, where he worked on complications for 14 years before opening his own repair workshop. In 1995, Dubuis launched his own brand, which he stayed involved with until his retirement in 2003.

Early Dubuis basically had two model lines, the round Hommage and the (I still don't know what shape to call it – squircle?) Sympathie. You can tell a lot about someone by asking if they're an Hommage or a Sympathie type of person. Ever the traditionalist, I'm an Hommage type of guy. Our Style Editor, Malaika? Sympathie all day.

To me, the simplest of these early Dubuis – the Hommage Condottieri – best captures the ethos of Genevan watchmaking, as expressed by Roger Dubuis.

Sometimes a watch lives up to its own ambitious name.

At a glance, the Hommage Condottieri is pretty simple: time-only, white enamel dial, and a large 40mm diameter. One of the first watches produced under the new Dubuis brand in the mid-'90s, it's still one of the best.

When you've been a watchmaker for a while like Dubuis and have more skill in a few fingertips than most have in all their extremities, you can use that skill to go minimal or maximal. Later, the Dubuis brand (especially after Dubuis the watchmaker retired) would go maximal – in designs, in complications, in everything – today its collection is defined by the extremely busy Excalibur and something called the "Hyper Watch."

But for the first few years, Dubuis went simple, not shtick. Inspiration from his time at Patek is all over his early watches. The Hommage Condottieri's fired enamel dial is snow white, with conservative painted Roman numeral indices and blue-steel leaf hands to match.

There are just a few lines of print on the enamel, and the "Bulletin D'Observatoire" above the sub-seconds at 6 o'clock hints at the special part of this watch: the movement inside. It's the caliber RD27, which is actually a totally reworked pocket watch movement from Tavannes. Dubuis took new-old-stock Tavannes caliber 507s and reconstructed them so they could carry the Geneva Seal (Poinçon de Genève).

This meant top-level finishing (Geneva stripes, polished teeth and screws, anglage), adding a Breguet spiral and a swan-neck regulator, and a host of other modifications. But the Condottieri was also certified for its timekeeping performance at the Observatoire National de Besançon in France. Just look at the Bulletin de Marche that comes as part of the set:

See Roger Dubuis' name on the Bulletin? That's because Dubuis himself was regulating the watch to these super-tight standards. And even this Bulletin is a statement: it's not a standard piece of paper, but a large parchment that feels more like a royal decree. At the time, Dubuis would've been one of only a few brands going to the lengths to obtain both the Geneva Seal and Besançon certification.

The Italian "Condottieri" translates to leader (not mercenaries), a quite literal statement by Dubuis as to what he wanted this particular Hommage to be. Today, the Homage Condottieri is still the grail for Dubuis collectors, and for many enthusiasts of early indies. Each RD27 caliber is numbered, and I've not seen a movement number higher than the 30s sell publicly.

A white gold Condottieri similar to the one in our photographs here sold at Phillips in the frothy times of November 2021 for HKD 592,000 (about $75,000). I was about to chalk this big result up to "well, everyone was throwing money at Phillips in November 2021," but then Phillips sold a pink gold Condottieri last November for HKD 756,000 (about $96,000). Things were decidedly less frothy by then, but this early Dubuis still managed to cut through the noise.

I'm not going to argue this is a $100,000 watch when, just a few years ago, one sold for $35,000. But prices aren't crashing on important early indie and neo-vintage watches like this Dubuis the way they have for modern, mass-produced watches. And if you're going to have an early Dubuis, the Hommage Condottieri is still the one to have.

You'll see that other early Dubuis Hommage and Sympathie pieces are limited editions of 28, but those are all counted by case material and dial combination (for example, there'd be 28 examples of a white gold H40 chronograph with a salmon dial, then another 28 with a white dial, then another 28 with a black dial, and so on; but don't take it from me – A Collected Man has done an excellent job cataloging this).

As we can tell from the movement numbers, the Hommage Condottieri is significantly rarer. Not to mention, each was regulated by the watchmaker himself!

The story of what exactly happened to Roger Dubuis the brand is for another day, though it's a story "so common that it's almost the inevitable fate of most watchmakers who go into business with businessmen," JX Su wrote in an obituary when Mr. Dubuis died in 2017. Suffice it to say that the company was in debt when the 2008 financial crisis came along, having invested hundreds of millions in a new manufacturer to produce dozens of in-house movements that didn't really work that well. Soon, Richemont bought a controlling stake in the company. It still exists today albeit in a very different form.

To my mind, early Dubuis pieces like the Hommage Condottieri are the best the brand ever made. And they maintain a high level of excellence and collectibility to this day.

This is one of those watches. It's not listed in the Hodinkee Shop, but we do own it, and we're making it available for purchase via our private sales team. If you happen to be interested in this particular Hommage Condottieri (or really, any other early Dubuis)  reach out to privatesales@hodinkee.com.

Going forward, we'll continue to tell the stories of watches we love. Sometimes they'll be Hodinkee's watches (like this week) and sometimes they won't be.

We'll focus on vintage, though we feel this category of collecting has expanded to also include "neo-vintage" watches from the '80s and '90s, like this early Dubuis. Whether we're selling the piece or not, we view this as an opportunity to pull back the curtain and show off some of the coolest watches we see on the market – especially when they're so discreet that you might otherwise miss them.