Horizon Watches Debuts with the Horizon Diver
The latest crowdfunded maker of affordable dive watches, Horizon Watches was founded by a veteran of the micro-brand scene, Fred Bekher, a designer who has penned dozens of watches for horological startups. Mr Bekher’s first design for his own brand is the Nautilus, a dive watch with an Art Deco-meets-steampunk aesthetic. Though the model name sounds like something else, it takes inspiration from literature, specifically the submariner commanded by Caption Nemo from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. “While I was reading [the novel] as a child, I would imagine how the Nautilus looked like”, Mr Bekher says of his love for sci-fi and the steampunk world of Verne’s works. Initial thoughts The model name aside, the Nautilus is an original design – it manages not to look like anything else – which is an achievement in the space of affordable dive watches. It’s also thought in form, something that’s evident in the dial and case construction, notable for a watch that starts at US$350. And the design is appealing, most notably the Art Deco font and the smartly-disguised date. And smart it is: the date window is sized identically to the hour markers, while the date disc is entirely “lumed”, so it glows just like an hour marker. That said, some details do inevitably call to mind other, more famous dive watches, namely the Breguet Marine in terms of the dial and the Blancpain Fifty-Fathoms for the bezel, but as a whole the Nautilus passes ...
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