The De Bethune DBS DBSWS1

The De Bethune DBS came along fairly early in the history of the company — it was introduced in 2005, just three years after Denis Flageollet and David Zanetta founded the company, in 2002. It was, however, a major break with the company’s original design language, although as we’ll see, the family relationship between the first, more classically influenced De Bethune watches and the DBS is closer than you might think at first glance. <a href="../watches/de-bethune/">De Bethune</a> launched in 2002 with a design language that seemed very much connected with some very traditional fine watchmaking design cues — cases were round, with almost pocket watch-like dials and hands, and although timepieces like the DB1 monopusher chronograph were slightly on the large size, they were certainly well within the standards of the time, with only the bullet-shaped, or ogival, lugs to distinguish them from a watch that could just as plausibly have said Breguet on the dial, as De Bethune.
Change was in the wind, however, and in 2005 the DBS appeared. The slightly pocket watch adjacent vibe of the earlier watches was fully realized in the DBS, but not in a way that anyone could have predicted just from looking at the earlier watches, though the connection is abundantly clear in retrospect. The DBS, moreover, was also a platform for demonstrating some of the innovations in fundamentals of high precision horology with which Flageollet had been experimenting.
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But let’s start with the case. The DBS has a very unusual design, with the crown placed at 12:00, right where it would be in a pocket watch. The crown itself is a miniature work of art, with very ornate and elaborate engravings and knurling that seem to exert a kind of magnetic attraction to the fingers; you want to wind the watch just for the pleasure of manipulating the crown. A pocket watch crown always has something called a bow, which arcs over the crown itself and acts as a place to connect the chain to which pocket watches are almost always attached; that’s there to make it easier to get the watch out of your pocket, and also to prevent it from hitting the ground if you happen to fumble it (the other end of the chain was usually attached to the owner’s waistcoat).
There’s no chain necessary here as the DBS is a wristwatch, but the bow is somewhat duplicated by the articulated upper lug, which is very firmly secured by a plate, held on with two screws, on the back. The articulated lug has a lot to do with making this a very wearable watch despite the size — the DBS is about 42.7mm across, and despite the impression it makes of size and heft when you look at it, it’s pretty flat, at just 11.1mm — not exactly an ultra-thin per se but still, it lies a lot lower on the wrist than you might think and as Tim Mosso mentioned in his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFJk0uciHBM" target="_blank" rel="noopener">video review of the DBS DBSRS1</a>, in rose gold, you could actually pair this with a dress shirt depending on how tight you like your cuffs (although I wonder just how much you’d have to upgrade your suit game to keep the rest of your get-up from being totally outshone by the watch). The articulated upper lug and very short lower lugs mean that despite the pretty extroverted design, you can wear this watch very comfortably even on a smaller wrist.
The watch shows the hours and minutes, thanks to a pair of blued titanium hands, and those hands (which are a sort of openworked variant on Breguet hands, speaking of Breguet) are paired with De Bethune’s distinctive — I’d even go so far as to say, iconic, although they’re not the only company ever to use one — spherical moonphase complication, which is accurate to only one day’s error in 120 years. A typical traditional moonphase display will be a day off after two years and seven months. The advantage of the higher accuracy moonphase (such accuracy has since 2005 and even before, become more or less obligatory in luxury watchmaking) is a little bit abstract in practical terms but if you love the pursuit of precision for its own sake, and don’t want to fiddle with a moonphase corrector pusher every couple of years, it’s a nice thing to have.
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Finally, there is a power reserve indicator hidden away on the back of the watch, which I think is often the best place for a power reserve. It’s an interesting and useful complication in its own right, especially in a hand-wound watch with a six-day power reserve like this one, but they can be difficult to integrate smoothly into the dial side of the watch and with the display on the back you get all of the benefits and none of the (potential) design drawbacks.
The hour track picks up the motif of blued titanium hemispheres from the moonphase, and they’re distributed evenly around the dial, set into a convex white metal surface (the moonphase does double duty as both an indication of the phase of the Moon, and the movement is somewhat inverted from the configuration usually found in a watch. Normally things like the movement plates and bridges, as well as the escapement and balance, are only visible from the back (assuming you’ve got a display back) but in the DBS as well as many other De Bethune watches from this point onward, all the critical parts of the mechanism are not only visible from the front, but specifically configured to act as integral parts of the overall design. The two large mainspring barrels are secured under a delta-shaped bridge, decorated with Geneva waves (“côtes de Genève,” or in this case “côtes De Bethune,” if you prefer) with the two pivots of the barrels visible in two very large jewels at about 10:00 and 2:30.
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You also have an unobstructed view of one of the most interesting oscillators in the business. Every watch, pretty much without exception unless it is quartz, has a balance wheel and in most watches, once you get past the initial fascination of seeing the balance turning back and forth under the impulse of the escapement and control of the balance spring, it’s not terribly interesting to look at. Denis Flageollet spent a great deal of time, however, experimenting with visually and technically much more interesting versions of the balance and in the DBS, you have a balance consisting of two blued titanium arms fitted with ovoid platinum weights at their extremities. The idea here is to have as much of the mass of the balance where it’s going to do the most good in maintaining a very precise and stable rate, so you want to have as much mass as you can (up to a point) on the outer rim and as little as possible elsewhere; with the combination of titanium arms and platinum weights, you get much closer to that goal than you would with a conventional annular, or ring-shaped, balance. The shape of the platinum weights has a purpose as well — their elongated profile makes for less aerodynamic drag.
The balance spring is worth mentioning as well. A normal flat balance spring expands and contracts as the balance oscillates — in watchmaker’s parlance, it “breathes,” but it doesn’t do so completely symmetrically, and that means that the spring will tend to push the balance sideways against its jeweled bearings. This is one of the biggest factors contributing to variation in rates depending on the position of the watch. One way to get around this is to use an overcoil spring, in which the outermost coil is bent back inwards and over the rest of the balance spring — usually this is called a Breguet overcoil, since Breguet made extensive use of it (you’ll also hear such springs called Phillips overcoils, after the French horologist, mathematician and physicist who calculated the mathematically correct form of the overcoil later in the 19th century).
The only problem with an overcoil balance spring is that they tend to add some extra, and sometimes unwanted, height to the movement and Flageollet came up with an alternative. This is a flat balance spring, but with an extra outer curve clamped onto it which forms a prominent final turn of the spring, set pretty far away from the rest of the spring. This gives a lot of the benefits of the overcoil, but without the extra height.
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Finally, the balance and spring sit underneath a really beautifully shaped, black-polished balance bridge, fixed at either end with two screws which sit in the slots of De Bethune’s patented “pare-chute” anti-shock system. This anti-shock system is in addition to the standard anti-shock spring on the balance pivots and it does two things: One, it makes the watch even more shock resistant (as you’d expect) but it als helps to re-center the balance more quickly in the event of a strong jolt. The fact that it also looks extremely beautiful is (very thick and delicious) icing on the cake.
This is one of the most interesting and historically important watches in De Bethune’s entire lineup. It broke totally new ground from a design standpoint and it’s an incredibly seductive watch to just look at, with all those carefully finished surfaces, and the contrast of polished and brushed white metal with heat-blued titanium. But it’s also full of some remarkable innovations in technical watchmaking as well. As an example of the integration of mechanical innovation with design inspiration, it’s hard to think of a better example in modern watchmaking and the DBS is a feast for the eye, mind, and heart in equal measure. What more could you want from a watch?
<a class="btn btn-primary" style="width: 298px; margin: 0 auto; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none;" role="button" href="../shop/De-Bethune-DBS-DBSWS1.html">SHOP THE DBS DBSWS1</a>

De Bethune

Written By

Jack Forster

WatchBox Global Editorial Director Jack Forster has been fascinated by every aspect of watches, clocks, and watchmaking for his entire life. He began systematically studying and learning about watches over 20 years ago, and during the first explosion of watch enthusiast forums, he became a moderator on thepurists.com. Jack became a full-time watch writer in 2007, when he joined Revolution Magazine, first as group technical and features editor, and then as editor in chief of Revolution Magazine USA. He joined the enthusiast website Hodinkee in 2015 as managing editor and then as Editor in Chief. In 2022, Jack joined WatchBox as the Global Editorial Director. He is the author of Cartier Time Art: Mechanics of Passion, and has written about watches, and other subjects, for many other venues including CNN, American Express Departures, and Vanity Fair.

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