Faubourg de Cracovie
Model History
Presented in 2018, the Faubourg de Cracovie is the third collection from the Czapek & Cie reborn in 2015, following the Quai des Bergues and the Place Vendôme line with suspended tourbillon. The name celebrates the Faubourg de Cracovie in Warsaw — today's Krakowskie Przedmieście — where the original house had opened its own boutique in 1854: a further piece in the brand's strategy of naming its collections after historic places tied to its nineteenth-century activity, following the Geneva lakefront and the Parisian square.
With this line Czapek turns the page from the almost academic rigor of the Quai des Bergues, offering a chronograph with a more contemporary, sporty character: the 41.5 mm case, available in steel, titanium and precious metals, houses dials with very different finishes from one another, from aventurine to guilloché to surfaces inspired by the world of motoring in the sportier executions, reflecting a deliberately eclectic stylistic search.
Powering the Faubourg de Cracovie is the SXH3 caliber, the third in-house movement developed by the house in collaboration with manufacture Vaucher: an automatic chronograph with column wheel, vertical clutch and a linear zero-reset hammer, beating at 5 Hz and offering a 65-hour power reserve — technical characteristics that place it among the most sophisticated chronographs offered by an independent manufacture of this size.
Technical Specifications
Main Executions
The collection's name does not commemorate a street in Paris, as one might think, but the Faubourg de Cracovie in Warsaw — today known as Krakowskie Przedmieście, one of the Polish capital's most prestigious streets — where the nineteenth-century Czapek & Cie had opened a boutique in 1854: a direct tribute to the Polish origins of founder Franciszek Czapek.