Recently we came across a Royal Oak which, although not a total unicorn, is nonetheless completely unusual at the very least. It’s an amazing replica AP watch, which comes with a yellow gold Royal Oak, with a rather amazing dial, cut away and engraved with an anchor-and-rope motif. The anchor is an obvious nod to the nautical inspiration behind the name, and design, of the Royal Oak, and the replica watch appears to never have been polished.
The dial engraving has a perfect sense of depth and texture and you can see something you don’t often get to see with Royal Oaks, which is the dial side of caliber 2120. The replica AP logo is printed correctly on the sapphire crystal.
AP says this fake watch was firstly sold in Hong Kong, in 1993, which would put it in about the right time frame for it to have been made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Royal Oak. This would also make sense regarding to reference numbers – the Royal Oak Jubilee Limited Edition is ref. 14802 and was also made in 1993. I’ve tried to find any mention of this particular reference online, and I’ve drawn a blank – and that includes looking through the archived Royal Oak database that used to be at royaloakclub.com, accessed using the Wayback Machine.
It was made in very small numbers (“quite rare” in their archivist’s words) according to the AP says that while this is not a special piece, and I can only assume that the owner(s) were simply not inclined to post images; besides, however many of these references were made, there were apparently few enough that they have never come up for auction either. Material Good’s Rob Ronen says, “Having sold Audemars Piguet’s timepieces since opening our doors several years ago, when the opportunity to source such a rare Royal Oak arose, we knew we had to do everything in our power to secure it.” “Quite rare,” seems to be putting it mildly; if AP says there are others out there, I’m sure they’re right but they’re surely extremely elusive.
Even though I’ve never seen this amazing model before, I do remember seeing some similar references, also with cut-out dials, but with different motifs, many years ago during my days as a moderator – I can’t forget one with an open-wheel Grand Prix car motif, but it was a long time ago and unfortunately any memory I have of particulars is long gone, assuming those pictures were of 20th anniversary models in the first place. The only other cut-out anchor dial AP I’ve ever seen is a very special animal – there was one obviously made for Marcus Margulies at Marcus of London in 2000, but that is either a white gold or platinum model, and it was apparently a custom piece, not a small series, as this one is just like this.