Let’s not kid ourselves: the Jacob & Co. Bugatti Calandre is a technical marvel, a collector’s grail, and a crystal-infused fever dream born of feverish Franco-Italian collaboration—but it is not the prettiest clock. And frankly, that’s kind of its point.
First, picture this: a small trunk, the kind that might hold the backup monocle for a Monaco yacht dweller. Inside? A chunk of French crystal straight from Lalique, a brand with a 100-year pedigree for making everything from hood ornaments to extravagant home décor for people who think subtlety is peasantry. The Calandre isn’t shy. Its crystal case is so transparent and so finely finished that it almost dares you to leave a single greasy fingerprint on it, just to see if the artisans in Wingen-sur-Moder can sense the disturbance.
Front and center, peering at you with the haughty gravitas of a French bulldog at a concours d’élégance, is a pair of “Dancing Elephants” — a tribute both to Rembrandt Bugatti and to the kind of Rococo excess that defined early-20th-century art clocks. They’re symmetrical, stately, and just a touch unsettling. The horseshoe grille beneath them, lifted from Bugatti’s most iconic cars, is the timepiece’s centerpiece—a literal Calandre, just in case you forgot that “radiator grille” sounds cooler in French.
But what truly screams nouveau riche is the 30mm, 288-facet, Jacob-cut, stoplight-red gemstone perched atop the clock like a traffic violation for good taste. It’s meant to represent the Bugatti “Macaron” logo, but in practice, it’s less “symphony of motoring history” and more “mother’s ring after a crossroads episode.”
Yet, for all its aesthetic bravado, the Calandre’s technical credentials are unimpeachable. Inside lurks a vertically placed flying tourbillon, a complication designed to defeat gravity’s impact on accuracy. The movement—caliber JCAM58, eight days of power—was built from the ground up. You wind it by inserting a bespoke key into the caseback, because twisting a normal crown is simply too gauche.
The clock is massive for a desk ornament: 264mm by 196mm of cut crystal, weighing about as much as a hardcover Proust, containing 189 components and a level of polish that would embarrass a Concours d’Elegance entrant’s chrome.
And yet, despite all the artisanal sparkle, collaborations worthy of a Netflix docudrama, and technical fireworks, the Calandre is unapologetically loud—an over-the-top marriage of horological science and automotive ostentation. Limited to 99 pieces and priced at $240,000, it’s a timekeeper for those who think owning a Veyron is too subtle.
It might not be the prettiest clock. But really, who wants “pretty” when you can have obscene, historic, and so memorably weird? In the world of automotive-jewelry mashups, sometimes bold beats beautiful—and the Bugatti Calandre roars past the line where taste quietly pulled over and called an Uber.
