The last of the great Geneva houses still owned by a family, and the one that has never had to explain why it charges what it does.
Antoine Norbert de Patek was a Polish cavalry officer who left after the November Uprising and settled in Geneva. In 1839 he went into business with the watchmaker François Czapek. Six years later Czapek was gone and Adrien Philippe had arrived — the man who had invented, in 1842, the keyless winding crown that made the winding key obsolete. On the first day of 1851 the firm took the name it still carries.
That same year Queen Victoria bought a keyless pendant watch from their stand at the Great Exhibition in London, which did the company no harm at all. The Stern family bought the business in 1932 during the Depression and still owns it — four generations, and the reason Patek can take a decade over a movement without a shareholder asking why.
The Calatrava arrived in 1932: a plain round watch with nothing on it, and the argument that a dress watch needs nothing else. The Nautilus came in 1976 from Gérald Genta, steel, porthole-shaped, and priced like gold, which at the time was thought to be a mistake. And in 1932 the house completed the Henry Graves Jr Supercomplication — twenty-four complications, delivered to its owner in January 1933, and for decades the most complicated watch ever made.
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