L. Leroy Marine Range watches

The L.Leroy Marine Range is a family of 43 mm gold watches modelled on the deck chronometer, the watch sailors used to check the time shown by the ship's on-board chronometer. The theme comes from the brand's naval past. L.Leroy was appointed official watchmaker to the Naval Ministry in 1835, supplied more than thirty royal, imperial and national navies as well as merchant and military fleets, and built more than 2,200 chronometers before the arrival of radio-controlled and computer clocks. The house has belonged to the Festina Group since 2004.

The Automatic Deck Chronometer is the core of the line. Its 43 mm case comes in 4N18 pink gold or 18-carat white gold, with sapphire crystals front and back. Inside is the calibre L511, beating at 28,800 vibrations per hour with more than 42 hours of power reserve, a variable-inertia balance with gold regulating screws and a central rotor in 22-carat gold. The dial is engine-turned by hand, and the hands are blued steel or gold-plated depending on the version. Each watch is numbered on the case and the dial and comes with its own chronometer certificate from the Besançon Observatory.

The reference tells the case metal: LL200 is the white gold chronometer and LL201 the pink gold one, with the number after the slash giving the dial, /1 silver and /2 black in both metals. Other dials come in brown, anthracite and two-tone brown-silver or grey-silver, and the white gold also in blue.

The Automatic Deck Chronograph, shown at Baselworld in 2014, adds a stopwatch to the same 43 mm format. LL202 is the white gold version, with silver, black or blue dials, and LL203 the pink gold, in silver or black. It draws on another strand of L.Leroy history: chronographs have been a speciality of the firm for almost a century and a half, and it was the first to develop and patent a chronograph measuring to a hundredth of a second, then to a thousandth.