Armin Strom Goes Solid Gold on the Tribute³ Au750

The Tribute is Armin Strom's more subdued line, the watch for people who like the brand's engineering but don't want a skeletonised movement staring that screams look at me. OK, to be fair, it's kind of hard to be subdued when you're fully made out of solid gold, but I would say it kind of works here. This is the new Tribute³ Au750 which keeps that calm face, but then slaps 18K rose gold into the case, the dials and the movement bridges.

The case is 38mm wide and 9.38mm thick (fantastic proportions), with sapphire on both sides and anti-reflective coating front and back. But from what I can tell in photos, it looks like there is no crystal, instead just a dial sitting there for you to touch. Unfortunately, you can't touch that beauty. Water resistance is 50 meters, but how much more should a gold dress watch have.

The main dial sits off-centre in solid rose gold, cut with a sunburst guilloché and marked with Roman numerals. The small seconds subdial gets a barleycorn grain d'orge pattern, and the exposed barrel sits under a polished gold bridge with finger-style arms. That's a lot of texture, but you need a lot of texture to break up the entirely gold dial. The grey PVD steel Breguet-style hands, new to the Tribute, do the same job: gold hands on this dial would have vanished.

Inside is the manual-wound calibre AMW21, designed in-house, with 97% of its components made by Armin Strom. Its motor barrel flips the usual arrangement: the arbor turns to wind the spring while the drum stays fixed. That saves space, so the movement measures just 33.5mm across and 4.2mm thick yet runs for 100 hours, beating at 3.5 Hz. Through the back you see a clou de Paris three-quarter bridge with hand-bevelled edges over a grey PVD mainplate. The watch comes on a grey nubuck strap with grey stitching and a pin buckle in rose gold.

The Tribute³ Au750 is limited to eight pieces, priced at CHF 69,000. See more on the Armin Strom website.