This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. Few watch collectors can claim the dialed-in taste and idiosyncratic perspective of Roni Madhvani. Strip the handles off of Instagram, and I’m certain I could still point out with 100% accuracy which wrist photos belonged to the Uganda-based Madhvani.
It helps that if I had his kind of cash, I would be picking up exactly the same pieces: Patek Philippe’s most daring designs, often dreamt up by Gilbert Albert in the ’50s and ’60s; beautiful enamel-dial watches from Omega, Universal Genève, and Eska; plus a fleet of the rarest, funkiest Cartiers ever made. But while I’m used to seeing new pickups from Madhvani on the ‘Gram, I wasn’t expecting his recent announcement that he was selling a few of his most prized timepieces in an upcoming Monaco Legend Group auction. The collector decided specifically to put these pieces up for sale after his relationship with reps at present-day Cartier soured.
He’s now planning to set loose nearly all of the house’s pieces from his collection. He is a great case study for how the watch business operates at the highest levels. Because his tastes are so crystal clear, he says that dealers frequently reach out to him with pieces they think he would like before they go to market.
Madhvani estimates that 40 percent of his collection came to him through Instagram. A couple of the watches below came through a dealer he met on Instagram and are now estimated to sell for over six figures at auction. I spoke with Madhvani about what makes each of these four watches special.
Cartier “Cornice” High estimate of €120,000 (about $134,000) The history of Cartier can be sliced into two different periods. Before 1972, the individual Cartier branches in London, Paris, and New York were creatively empowered to make whatever they liked. This era birthed icons like the Crash—famously a product of Swinging ’60s London—along with many more obscure and oddball pieces that never became fixtures in the catalogs.
After ’72, Cartier started consolidating its watch production in Switzerland and has been producing watches in a much more standardized way ever since. However, in the decades leading up to that formalization, it was the Wild, Wild Romandy. The various branches could make their own designs bespoke for individual clients or small groups of them.
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