Description
To mark its 20th anniversary, La Chaux-de-Fonds independent ochs und junior has released a brand-new calendar complication: the Calendario Quattro Anni (CQA), a four-year calendar designed by the brand's co-founder Ludwig Oechslin. It is the first new ochs und junior calendar in years and slots between the existing Anno annual calendar (one adjustment per year, in February) and the Calendario Cent'Anni / CCA perpetual (one adjustment per century).
The CQA requires one manual adjustment every four years — it correctly handles the alternation of 30- and 31-day months across the entire four-year cycle, including 28- or 29-day February, but does not account for the once-a-century leap-year exception that a true perpetual handles mechanically. In exchange for that small concession to convention, Oechslin has built the entire complication from a handful of modified parts mounted on a standard automatic base — a piece of mechanical thinking that, even for ochs und junior, is unusually elegant.
Design
Visually, the Calendario Quattro Anni is unmistakably an ochs und junior. The dial is finished in the brand's circular-brushed oj-blue, with white-gold applied indices and hour and minute hands, and the signature orange seconds hand. The date is read out across two rows of fifteen square apertures at the bottom of the dial — each aperture corresponding to one minute interval, so that the edges of the apertures simultaneously act as minute and second indices. The month is shown in a small orange aperture above the date display, deliberately echoing the chromatic logic of the seconds hand.
The case is the brand's familiar polished titanium 39 mm × 9.5 mm housing — minimalist, with no flared lugs, and a flat sapphire crystal. The case-back is solid, with no exhibition window — Oechslin's calendar work is meant to be experienced through the dial, not the movement. Every CQA is hand-assembled and regulated in the ochs und junior workshop.
Specifications
- Reference: Calendario Quattro Anni (CQA)
- Case material: Titanium, polished
- Case diameter: 39 mm
- Case thickness: 9.5 mm
- Crystal: Flat sapphire
- Case-back: Solid titanium, screw-down
- Dial: Circular-brushed oj-blue with two rows of 15 square apertures (date), small orange month aperture, white-gold applied indices, orange seconds hand
- Movement: Modified base automatic calibre with Oechslin four-year calendar module (re-worked Maltese cross, independently developed switching wheel, three-toothed wheel for variable month-length impulses — three for February)
- Frequency: 28,800 vph (4 Hz)
- Power reserve: approx. 40 hours
- Functions: Hours, minutes, seconds, date, month — calendar requires one adjustment every four years
- Winding: Automatic, hand-winding, hacking
- Strap: Leather, hand-stitched, with titanium pin buckle
- Production: Made-to-order, capacity-constrained, 50 % prepayment at order
- Price: CHF 7,460 incl. Swiss VAT / CHF 6,900 export
- Availability: Direct from ochsundjunior.swiss; first deliveries early October 2026
What's Exciting
This is Oechslin doing what only Oechslin does: collapsing a complication the rest of the industry treats as a 100-plus-component perpetual module into a handful of modified parts mounted on a stock base. A modern perpetual calendar from any mainstream Swiss manufacture starts at around CHF 25,000 to 60,000, with hundreds of components and a service interval that reflects them. The Calendario Quattro Anni delivers practical, real-world calendar accuracy — one adjustment every four years is exactly what most owners actually experience — at CHF 6,900 export, in a case design that is closer to architecture than horology.
It is also the only four-year calendar on the market. Most brands either commit to perpetual or to annual; the four-year band, where the leap-year complexity actually lives but the century rule is a footnote, has gone unfilled for decades. For ochs und junior to claim that empty space — and to do it with the same dial-as-diagram aesthetic that defined the original Anno — is exactly the kind of editorial move that makes the brand matter beyond its small production volumes.
History
Ludwig Oechslin is best known outside ochs und junior for designing Ulysse Nardin's Astrolabium Galileo Galilei, Planetarium Copernicus and Tellurium Johannes Kepler in the late 1980s and early 1990s — three watches that defined what an independent astronomical complication could be — and for running the Musée International d'Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He co-founded ochs und junior in 2006 with Beat Weinmann, with the brand built explicitly to make the kind of calendar and astronomical watches Oechslin wanted to build without committee.
The brand's first watch was the Anno annual calendar — a complication Oechslin reduced to just a handful of additional parts on top of an ETA 2824 base, and which won the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève. The Cent'Anni (CCA) perpetual followed, again with a mechanism that bypassed conventional perpetual architecture. The Calendario Quattro Anni completes the calendar family across the annual / four-year / perpetual range and lands exactly twenty years after the brand's founding.
