Favre Leuba Recuts the Chief Tourbillon With a Hand-Engraved Blue Guilloché Dial

Favre Leuba’s Chief Tourbillon was one of the better releases of 2025 that I'm not sure got the love it should have: a steel tourbillon from a revived brand that felt like serious watchmaking rather than a logo on a bought-in movement. The Chief is the brand’s cushion-cased sports line, and the tourbillon version has a calibre reworked by Jean-François Mojon, whose Chronode workshop has built movements for MB&F, Czapek and Hermès. This second edition keeps that cool movement and replaces the dial with blue barleycorn guilloché cut by hand.

The steel case is 41mm wide and 11.45mm thick, with brushed and polished surfaces alternating across the cushion shape. There’s a curved sapphire crystal up front and a sapphire caseback. It's a big watch, and I wish they could have made it just a bit thinner. Water resistance is 100 meters.

The barleycorn pattern radiates out from the center, engraved on a rose engine lathe built in the late 1800s. Each dial takes between five and six hours. Hand-cut blue guilloché is the kind of thing photos never quite capture, because the texture changes with every angle. The applied indices are rhodium-plated and polished, and the brushed hour and minute hands have a sandblasted groove down the middle. Both have Super-LumiNova C1 X1, which glows blue. Lume on a guilloché tourbillon is unusual, but this is a sports case, so it works. At six o’clock the tourbillon bridge is shaped like an hourglass, the Favre Leuba emblem, and it also holds the seconds track and a flame-blued seconds hand.

The movement is calibre FL T01, a manual-wind tourbillon based on the Chronode C502. It runs at 3Hz, has 23 jewels and offers 60 hours of power reserve. The cage is 14.85mm across and turns once a minute. The bridge is brushed horizontally on top and circular-grained on its edge. Through the back you can see Geneva stripes, an anthracite finish, blue screws and an hourglass in spiral relief over a laser-engraved background. The watch comes on an integrated steel bracelet with brushed H-shaped outer links, polished center links and a folding clasp, plus a blue FKM rubber strap with a pin buckle. Swapping between them is tool-free.

The Favre Leuba Chief Tourbillon Guilloché Dial is limited to 25 pieces and it's priced at €30,000. See more on the Favre Leuba website.