Oris Releases Hölstein Edition 2026; FC's Solar Powered Moneta; The Barrelhand Monolith Is The Space Watch We Deserve; CvdK Brings Back The Eclipse Dial; AP's Summery Royal Oak Offshore Chronos

Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. I can’t even begin to explain to you how nice the weather is here. Perfect temperature, sun just bright enough to warm you during a casual walk, light breeze to make everything feel even better… And here I am, stuck at home because I’m sick as a dog. Great.

In this issue

• Oris Celebrates 122 Years With The Hölstein Edition 2026 Artelier Small Seconds

• Frederique Constant Puts Solar Power Inside The Elegant Classics Moneta Solarmetre

• The Barrelhand Monolith Wants The Be the Watch The Modern Space Age Actually Deserves

• Christiaan van der Klaauw Brings the Eclipse Dial Back for Reijersen's Taste of Time Festival

• Audemars Piguet Brings Out A Summer Themed Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph in 42mm and 37mm

👂What’s new

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Oris Celebrates 122 Years With The Hölstein Edition 2026 Artelier Small Seconds

Oris has been releasing a Hölstein Edition every June 1st since the early 2000s, each one tied to the brand's birthday and its roots in the small Swiss village that gives the series its name. This year's edition uses the newly redesigned Artelier, a collection that got a full makeover in 2026 under Lena Huwiler, a 24-year-old product design engineer Oris brought in specifically to move the very traditional collection to a more younger audience. The result, at least in this limited edition form, is quite good.

The case is 39.5mm wide and 11.1mm thick, with polished steel and clean, unpretentious lines. Lug-to-lug is 45.5mm, making it very wearable. There’s not much more to this case other than the 30 meters of water resistance and a closed caseback with a laser-engraved image of the Oris Bear peeking from the side.

The dial is light grey and minimal, with one deliberate focal point: a mirror-polished small seconds sub-dial at 6 o'clock with a bright red hand. It's a bold choice. The wedge-shaped hour markers, polished to catch light at different angles, were pulled from Oris' 1960s catalog but don’t look artificially retro. The blunt-tipped hands carry slim lume inserts and echo the shape of the stepped indices.

Inside is Oris calibre 401, a variant of their in-house calibre 400 introduced in 2020 that swaps central seconds and a date for the small seconds sub-dial at 6. The 400-series is genuinely good — antimagnetic, two barrels, 5-day power reserve, with decent accuracy stats. The watch comes on a grey suede leather strap with a butterfly clasp, which suits the overall mood.

The Oris Hölstein Edition 2026 is limited to 250 pieces and retails for CHF 3,800. See more on the Oris website.

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Frederique Constant Puts Solar Power Inside The Elegant Classics Moneta Solarmetre

The Classics Moneta has become one of Frederique Constant's more interesting lines. When it launched in 2024, the coin-edged case and quartz movement were a delightful little watch. The Moonphase that followed last year made it onto my list of the best quartz watches of 2025. Now the collection gets its most significant update yet, with Frederique Constant's first solar-powered movement in the new Classics Moneta Solarmetre.

The case has grown slightly to accommodate the new movement, up from 37mm to 39mm wide and from 7.65mm to 8.52mm thick. The coin-edge fluting on the case middle that defines the whole Moneta line is still there, flanked by a steel case with sapphire crystal on top. Water resistance is 50 meters.

Three dial colors are available: ice blue, burgundy, and cloud white. They look opaque but are actually translucent, which allows light to pass through them to reach the photovoltaic cells just beneath, feeding the FC-120 calibre. The grained texture is new to the Moneta line and adds a tactile dimension to otherwise simple dials. Dauphine hands, faceted applied hour markers, and a date window at 3 o'clock complete the package.

The FC-120 is co-developed with La Joux-Perret, the same movement partner behind the TH50-00 solar calibre in TAG Heuer's Solargraph. One minute of light exposure gives a day of running time, with a theoretical maximum reserve of ten months in complete darkness. In practice, solar movements don't run out — they just need to see light occasionally, which a worn watch does by default. Both a crocodile-embossed leather strap and a Milanese steel bracelet are included in the box.

The Frederique Constant Classics Moneta Solarmetre is priced at CHF 1,150 for all three colors. See more on the Frederique Constant website.

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The Barrelhand Monolith Wants The Be the Watch The Modern Space Age Actually Deserves

The Speedmaster didn't win NASA's qualification trials because it was designed for space. It won because it was the best of the commercial watches Omega happened to be making for motorsport at the time — and crucially, because no one had yet built a watch with those tests in mind. Barrelhand, a brand that has spent six years developing the Monolith, is making the argument that someone finally should. The premise is straightforward enough: take the ambition of the original NASA procurement process and apply it to hardware designed from scratch to survive a crewed deep-space mission.

The case is 38mm wide and 45mm lug-to-lug, 11.8mm thick, and 3D-printed from Scalmalloy — a modified aluminum alloy used in aerospace applications that exceeds titanium's yield strength at roughly half the weight. The whole watch, minus the strap, weighs 31 grams. The case geometry is angular and recessed to use as little material as possible, and the casebacks and strap bars are fastened with Torx screws sized to match existing ISS toolsets. Water resistance is rated to 200 meters, and the watch has also been tested at 0 ATM — in a vacuum. The 8mm crown is glove-operable and can be wound and set underwater. An internal shock-absorption system Barrelhand calls an "engine mount" is rated to withstand over 3,000 g. Aircore insulation handles temperature and pressure variation. The sapphire is lab-grade C-plane with a magnesium fluoride coating to cut glare.

The dial's central feature is what Barrelhand calls the Aerolight X2: a monolithic ceramic lume structure produced in collaboration with James Thompson, known in watch circles as Black Badger. It's welded into a brass plate assembly with no adhesives or paint, and it's rated to hold up between -120 °C and 120 °C. Legibility is clearly the first priority, but the structure has real visual depth — a stacked, almost architectural quality that gives the matte black dial a very dramatic look.

The M1 engine is an automatic movement built on the Sellita SW300-1b, running at 4Hz with a Glucydur balance, a nickel-phosphorus escape wheel and fork, and a 50-hour power reserve. It’s also regulated to ±5 seconds per day across six positions, antimagnetic to ISO 764. The strap is a fabric hook design with separate configurations for EVA and IVA use, closing with a grade-5 titanium hook. The caseback, rather than showing the movement or a polished cap, holds a holographic disc — a 3 GB NanoFiche cultural archive encoded into a nickel-based film, containing among other things UNESCO preamble translations, a visual sound artifact by Richard D. James, and the original French edition of Le Petit Prince. It's rated to last 1,000 years.

The Barrelhand Monolith is priced at $9,750, currently on pre-order, with deliveries expected in Q4 2026. This has been quite the controversial pricing strategy, but it’s quite a unique watch. See more on the Barrelhand website.

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Christiaan van der Klaauw Brings the Eclipse Dial Back for Reijersen's Taste of Time Festival

You know how much I like the Christiaan van der Klaauw Ariadne. It’s one of those watches that looked OK in photos, but completely blew me away on wrist. What I wasn’t familiar with was the Eclipse edition which had a combination of a Dutch church and windmill rendered above the moon disc. I didn’t know about it because it’s sold out everywhere. However, CvdK just brought it back with the Ariadne Holland Heritage Edition made for Reijersen Juweliers of Oudewater for their third annual Taste of Time show.

The case remains unchanged from the ragular Ariadne, which means a steel case measuring 40mm wide, polished and domed across its surfaces, with straight lugs that carry a screw-like cabochon, an onion-shaped crown, and double-gadroon pushers. It's a case that has a certain old-world gravity to it without tipping into pastiche. Just don’t dip it too deep with its 30 meters of water resistance.

The dial is where things get really interesting. The church and windmill that made the Eclipse so appealing to anyone with a Dutch heart reappear here above the moon phase disc at 6 o’clock. You can get the dials in either turquoise or silver, both with orange details. Both versions have chronograph subdials, a 24-hour indicator, a peripheral date hand, and month and day-of-week displays — the last of these printed in Dutch, which is a very CvdK thing to do. Applied Breguet numerals and the brand's "Sun with 12 Claws" logo at 3 o'clock, both in blue, appear on both dials.

Inside is the calibre 7751, a calendar and moon phase variant of the Valjoux 7750 — a workhorse by any measure, but one that does the job well and is easily servicable. The rotor was engraved by Jochen Benzinger with a guilloché pattern and finished with a hand-engraved gold-plated sun, which makes the caseback at least as interesting as the dial. Both versions come on an FKM rubber strap with a sailcloth texture, in blue or orange.

The Christiaan van der Klaauw Ariadne Holland Heritage Edition is limited to 50 pieces in each colorway priced at €10,990. Here’s a bit of a problem. I kind of messed up and didn’t realize that the Taste of Time event was this past weekend, and that’s where you could have made orders for this edition. However, it might not be late to get one, so reach out to Reijersen Juweliers to see if they have any. You can do so here.

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Audemars Piguet Brings Out A Summer Themed Royal Oak Offshore Chronograph in 42mm and 37mm

"The Beast" stuck as a really good nickname of the Royal Oak Offshore because in 1993 a watch with those proportions, those exposed screws, and that Mega Tapisserie dial were actually radical, much like the Royal Oak itself had been radical two decades earlier. Now, a year past the 30th anniversary, Audemars Piguet is releasing the Offshore in a colorway that suits summer: six new chronograph references split across two case sizes, all with colour-matched accents, and a new movement making its debut in the smaller format.

The larger three of the group come in at 42mm wide and 15.3mm thick, made ou tof steel or titanium, depending on the color you go for. What they all share is the full Offshore treatment — Mega Tapisserie dial, sapphire front and back, 100 meters of water resistance — and a single accent colour threaded through the chronograph hands, tachymeter scale, and the start-stop pusher at 2 o'clock. The colour choices are pink accents on a black dial, orange on silver-toned, and yellow with turquoise on a dark grey titanium version. The movement is Calibre 4404, introduced back in 2019 with the Code 11.59 collection. It's an in-house integrated chronograph with column wheel and vertical clutch, 4 Hz, 70-hour power reserve. All three come on interchangeable calfskin straps with colour-matched stitching, and all three are priced at CHF 33,600.

The 37mm group is three watches with a different character altogether. These come on rubber straps rather than calfskin, and they’re equipped with a brand-new movement: the Calibre 6401, designed specifically for the smaller case and measuring 27mm in diameter against the 4404's 32mm. Same beat rate of 4 Hz, but a shorter 55-hour power reserve as the trade-off for the reduced size. The three versions break down as such: titanium with a turquoise tapisserie dial and flat bezel bezel; titanium with a pink dial and diamond-set steel bezel; and pink gold with diamond-set bezel and a light blue dial. Pricing is CHF 32,500 for the plain titanium, CHF 36,300 for the diamond-set titanium, and CHF 54,100 for the gold and diamonds version.

The six Royal Oak Offshore Chronographs are available now. See more on the Audemars Piguet website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Do you remember the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan? The village of Glod certainly does. Paid a tiny fee to participate, villagers believed they were taking part in a “report.” Instead, the film portrayed them as the impoverished and violent inhabitants of a fictional Kazakh village, leaving many feeling humiliated and deceived. In this piece, Miles Ellingham returns to Glod twenty years later to meet the people behind the punchline and show readers the real village.

• Jonathan Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of science journalism, is “The Memory Man” in his family. His brother Eric, a creator of Dora the Explorer, is not. Weiner, a professor of science journalism, explores the ways in which autobiographical memory—from “highly superior” to “severely deficient,” “relentless remembering” to dry, factual recall—affect our sense of self over time. As with “Double Exposure,” his excellent essay about childhood amnesia, Weiner tests his own boundaries, finding a neuropsychologist to run a memory test on himself and his brother.

• In this personal essay for Off Assignment’s No Equivalent series, Iranian-American writer Yasmin Roshanian reflects on darde ghorbat, a Farsi phrase that means “the sorrow of exile,” and what it means to inherit a homeland she’s never visited. Roshanian writes about having no interest in her family’s culture when growing up, and how her Farsi speaking skills slowly faded away. She also writes about grief across her family’s generations—including the inability to communicate with her grandparents, and her fear of not being able to pass Farsi or Iranian culture down to her future children—and whether she can reclaim what is slipping away.

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One video you have to watch today

We’re due to get a new car soon and I can’t explain how annoyed I am that the vast majority of the offering right now are SUVs. And I do not want to change my wagon for a hatchback on stilts. Why can’t we make cool wagons again?

Thanks for reading,
Vuk