Description
Chopard has brought back its regulator, and the second attempt is considerably better judged than the first. The L.U.C 1963 Heritage Regulator, reference 161993-1001, is a 40 mm white-gold watch limited to 25 pieces that condenses six indications — central minutes, off-centre hours, small seconds, date, a second time zone and a nine-day power reserve — into a dial that still reads cleanly at a glance.
It replaces a 2015 L.U.C Regulator that measured 43 mm, and almost every change is a correction: the case has come down three millimetres, the movement has gained a day of autonomy, the dial has shed its printed labels, and the date has moved to six o'clock where it belongs. At US$50,900 it is priced as serious haute horlogerie, and the COSC certification plus the Poinçon de Genève hallmark are there to justify it.
Design
The case is 40 mm across and 10.3 mm thick in 18k ethical white gold, with a satin-brushed caseband set against a polished bezel and caseback, and a 7 mm white-gold crown carrying the L.U.C logo. A pusher on the left flank, at eight o'clock, advances the second time zone in one-hour steps. The sapphire crystal is glareproofed, the caseback is an exhibition window, and a "stadium"-shaped spacer ring surrounds the movement inside.
The dial is sunburst silver with a true regulator layout. A central dauphine-style white-gold hand carries the minutes; three recessed sub-dials with opaline centres and snailed outer rings hold the hours at three, small seconds with the date aperture at six, and a 24-hour GMT counter at nine that renders daytime with sunrays and night with horizontal lines. An arched power-reserve indicator sits at twelve, and the printing throughout is blue. The strap is grey alligator on an 18k white-gold pin buckle.
Specifications
- Reference: 161993-1001
- Case diameter: 40 mm
- Case thickness: 10.3 mm
- Case material: 18k ethical white gold
- Crystal: glareproofed sapphire; sapphire exhibition caseback
- Water resistance: 30 m
- Dial: sunburst silver-toned, regulator layout with three recessed sub-dials
- Movement: L.U.C 98.02-L, in-house, hand-wound
- Movement dimensions: 30.4 mm x 4.9 mm
- Components / jewels: 244 / 39
- Frequency: 28,800 vph (4 Hz)
- Power reserve: 216 hours (9 days), Chopard Quattro four-barrel system
- Complications: regulator display, date, second time zone with 24-hour indication, power-reserve indicator
- Certification: COSC chronometer, Poincon de Geneve
- Strap: grey alligator with 18k ethical white gold pin buckle
- Limited edition: 25 pieces
- Price: US$50,900 (excluding taxes)
- Availability: Chopard boutiques
What's Exciting
Quattro is the point. Chopard's four-barrel architecture, arranged as two stacked pairs, is what lets a hand-wound movement of this thinness run 216 hours, and it has been the quiet technical signature of the Fleurier manufacture since the late 1990s. Putting it behind a regulator dial is the right pairing: a regulator separates the indications the way a precision benchmark clock does, and a nine-day reserve means the watch is still running accurately when you come back to it the following weekend.
What makes this version worth the attention is restraint. The 2015 original was a 43 mm watch with a busy, labelled dial; this one is 40 mm and says almost nothing it does not need to. Twenty-five pieces at US$50,900 is a narrow, expensive proposition, but the specification behind it — COSC on top of the Geneva Seal, 244 components, in-house from escapement to barrel bridge — is the kind of thing that usually costs more from a Genevan name with louder marketing.
History
Chopard was bought by Karl Scheufele III in 1963, the year the modern company's identity was set and the year this collection takes its name from. Three decades later his son Karl-Friedrich Scheufele built a movement manufacture at Fleurier in the Val-de-Travers to give Chopard genuine in-house watchmaking, and the first L.U.C watch — named for founder Louis-Ulysse Chopard — appeared in 1997 with the calibre 1.96 micro-rotor.
Regulators sit awkwardly in most catalogues because they descend from workshop reference clocks rather than from wristwatches, and Chopard's first take in 2015 struggled with the format at 43 mm. This 2026 edition is the correction: smaller, longer-running and stripped back, with the 98.02-L's Quattro barrels doing the work that makes the layout worth having.
