Alexandre Meerson Altitude Premiere watches

The Alexandre Meerson Altitude Premiere is a slim, round dress watch from the house that Alexandre Meerson, a Paris-born designer and the third generation of a family of watchmakers and designers, launched in 2014. Meerson says the Premiere is where the brand began, and it sits in the Altitude collection alongside the Officier and the Pop'Art. The brand says it makes 50 pieces of the series a year.

The design is deliberately quiet: delicately curved lugs, a curved, hand-finished dial with applied indices and numerals, and Meerson's signature asymmetrical hour and minute hands. The brand cites the Art Deco movement as the inspiration and says the plain dial references a flight of carved stone steps in Shanghai. The 41 mm case is about 8.6 mm thick, with a sapphire crystal on the front, a flush, concave sapphire display back and water resistance to 30 m.

Inside is the AM-4808, a self-winding calibre that Vaucher makes for Meerson, with two barrels and a 56-hour power reserve. Vaucher, the sister company of Parmigiani, also supplied the movement for Meerson's D15 MK-1 GMT.

The variants are defined by what sits at 6 o'clock. The Classic (101PBIR) shows hours and minutes alone on a silver dial in a gold case. The Date (101PBKS) keeps the gold case and adds a date window cut with carved steps, here on a grey dial. The Small Seconds (101PEJT) moves to a lightweight titanium case with a silver dial and a small seconds sub-dial at 6. Because Meerson works to order, much like a bespoke tailor, the case size, hands, dial and indices can all be changed, and the Premiere is also made with a 36 mm case.