Don't miss the next drop
By 1994 the Swiss recovery had settled into a formula, and the formula was round. What Baume & Mercier launched that year went the other way entirely: the Hampton, a narrow curved rectangle wearing the geometric vocabulary of 1920s Art Deco. The house’s own account of the launch calls it a break with the aesthetic codes of the times, which is a restrained Genevan way of saying they knew exactly what they were doing. This Baume Mercier Hampton MV045120 is that argument in its automatic form.
The name came from Long Island. Baume & Mercier took it from the Hamptons, the run of seaside towns on the South Fork that had been drawing summer people since the 1870s, and the borrowing was the whole brief: a dress watch that carries itself without raising its voice. The bet held. The Hampton is still in the Baume & Mercier catalogue more than thirty years on.
Baume & Mercier is unusually specific about where the Hampton came from, and it names two sources rather than one: a piece from its own 1960s archive as the direct model, and the 1920s for the look. The second is plain on the dial. Hard geometry, tall drawn numerals, an inner track laid out like a railway timetable. A design pulled from two different pasts and assembled in the nineties, still reading as one clear idea.
The self-winding movement is where the Hampton stops being only a styling exercise. A case 24.5mm across leaves very little room for a round caliber, and the workhorse Swiss automatics of the period run about 25.6mm in diameter. They do not fit. Putting an automatic inside a rectangle this narrow meant reaching for one of the handful of small-diameter calibers the industry made rather than the movement everyone else bought by the crate, and doing it on purpose. That is why a Hampton automatic was a different proposition from a quartz one, and still is. The rotor here is signed and stamped BM8395.
The case is polished stainless steel, 24.5mm across by 40mm long on 18mm lugs, curved along its length so it settles onto the wrist instead of perching on it. The dial is off-white, the full Arabic set printed tall and dark, the six given over to a framed date aperture, with dark leaf hands sweeping over a chemin de fer inner track. No lume anywhere, on dial or hands. We have left the wear alone: fine scratching across the polished flanks and the caseback, heavier on the side by the crown, and a faint mark near one edge of the crystal. The crown is signed, the caseback carries the reference and the case number, and the inside of that caseback is swirled with the circular marks a watchmaker leaves behind. It is not water resistant.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, this Baume Mercier Hampton MV045120 comes on a brown leather strap with the signed Baume & Mercier folding clasp. The strap reads as a replacement, creased and darkened from wear we would rather disclose than hide. A rectangle was a decision in 1994. On the wrist, it still is.
