Once More, With Feeling

Completed just as the world entered an unprecedented lockdown over two years ago, Patek Philippe's CHF600 million production facility in the outskirts of Geneva finally opens its doors to select collectors and partners.

- Alvin Wong

PATEK PHILIPPE CALLS it PP6, the brand’s sixth production wing at Plan-les-Ouates in the Genevan suburbs; a watchmaking plant that will birth all your Calatravas, Nautiluses, Aquanauts, Gonodolos and Twenty~4s for foreseeable decades to come. A creative hub, inner sanctum and manufacturing monolith rolled into one, PP6 took five years to construct and cost almost CHF600 million—and it is bigger and better than any facility that Patek Philippe has built.

PP6 needed to be massive, too. Especially when the 184-year-old company has outgrown itself several times over. Patek Philippe has come a long way from the 19th century, when its watchmakers made timepieces at the top floor of its historic building on rue du Rhône, along Lake Geneva, which is now an iconic landmark that houses its flagship salon. And also, from the facilities it constructed in 1964 and 1996, which quickly filled to capacity.

Though PP6 officially opened in 2020, it remained a mystery to people outside Patek Philippe, no thanks to a pandemic that shuttered global borders. Almost three years on, however, Robb Report Singapore finally had a chance to tour the facility. It was as much a peek into the inner workings of Patek Philippe as it was a view to the foresight of Thierry Stern, the company’s president, and his father and predecessor, Philip, who in the 1990s had already envisioned a futureproof manufacture that would house Patek Philippe’s production departments and ateliers under one roof.

Opposites Attract

Walking along the wide corridors that seem to stretch forever, one cannot help but be struck by the delicious contradictions that the building and its inhabitants offer. Within the factory is a confluence of man and machine, tradition and innovation, and things big and small.