Engineer turned Auction Specialist
Like so many collectors, Paul Boutros’s path to watch collecting began with fond memories of his father. But his story diverges from the norm when he talks about how he and his father developed their mutual interest in horology side-by-side, Paul as a child and his father as an adult.
On a fateful day in 1986, strolling up Fifth Avenue in New York after a coin show—the pair already had coin collecting in common—a host of beautiful timepieces in a Wempe window called out to the younger Boutros. When he was close enough to see the four-and five-figure prices printed on the tags, the 10-year-old was at once confused and enamored. He had to know more about these objects, and has spent much of his life since in pursuit of that knowledge. Boutros now ranks among the world’s foremost horological experts, founding and operating the New York watch office for Phillips Auction House.
From about the age of 10 until departing for college, where he studied electrical engineering, Boutros and his father assembled a very fine watch collection. The first timepiece he recalls acquiring was a nine-karat gold Tudor dress watch, a flea market discovery, which cost a mere $200. Some time later, the father and son purchased their first high-end timepiece, an Audemars Piguet with day and date, a watch that instantly demonstrated the difference between a finely finished movement and a more utilitarian, everyday timepiece like the Tudor.
“When we looked at the exquisite craftsmanship of that first A.P., we both instantly understood high-end watchmaking,” says Boutros.
In college, somewhat overwhelmed by the rigor of pursuing an engineering degree while maintaining a social life, Boutros let watches fall to the wayside. It was only when Boutros Sr. passed away that Paul found himself unboxing the watch collection he had built with his father. An overwhelming sense of emotion swept over him. These watches, which he could hold and touch and wear, were deeply connected to many of his happiest memories with his father. From that point on, Boutros has been an avid “watch guy.”
“I balanced my time working at Lockheed Martin with my passion for collecting and writing about watches. Over the years, employment opportunities in the watch world occasionally popped up, but it was nothing compelling enough to leave my career. I got my first real taste of what working in watches could be like when a luxury brand approached me about designing a new range of watches. In my capacity as their part-time consultant, I hired Eric Giroud.”
Boutros’s most prized timepieces include his 1954 Rolex Kew A Observatory Chronometer, of which only 24 were made. As one of the rarest and most accurate Rolex mechanical timepieces ever, the Kew A is a grail for die-hard vintage Rolex buffs.
A Patek Philippe Perpetual Calendar and a rare Vacheron Constantin doctor’s chronograph are some his other most cherished timepieces, but no watch Paul owns is so dear that he wouldn’t put it on and wear it at least occasionally. Boutros believes watches are made to be enjoyed, and he quite regularly does so as he goes about his work.
In 2014, the opportunity to enter the watch business came at the invitation of Aurel Bacs, perhaps horology’s best known auctioneer and curator, who had just left Christie’s to become head of the newly established watch division at Phillips Auctioneers.
“We had the chance to create a watch division from a blank slate, exactly as we wanted to do it. From the beginning, transparency was absolutely key,” says Boutros. “I shot the first three Geneva watch catalogs myself, and I don’t even know how to use Photoshop. To this day, every image we present is the unvarnished reality of the watch’s condition. We have no reason to hide anything about our watches because we only select the best we can find, and we reject about 70-80 percent of the watches that come our way.
In relatively short order, Paul and his colleagues at Phillips have put the auction house on the map as a leader in the watch category. The top lots in the company’s fourth watch auction, to be held Nov. 12-13 in Geneva, are symbolic of Phillips’s rapid rise. For the first time ever, an auction house will present, in a single auction, a trilogy of Patek Philippe 1518 Perpetual Calendar Chronographs in steel, rose gold, and yellow gold. —Jonathan Bues