Louis Erard and Vianney Halter have been working together since 2020, and by now you know the drill: Halter’s dials and hands get layered onto a Louis Erard base, usually Le Régulateur. However, Futur Antérieur makes a significant change to that playbook. The pair’s third collaboration is the first with a case of its own: 38mm wide and 8.85mm thick, in steel, with two riveted portholes lifted from Halter’s 1998 Antiqua, each driven by its own Sellita SW100 automatic movement.
The name is the French future-perfect tense – used for something that will have happened by a given point, a knotted way of saying the watch looks backward and forward at once, and it’s the phrase Halter has long used for his own retro-futurist aesthetic that’s being recreated here. Holding this watch side by side with an Antiqua, you can immediately see the resemblance. As Halter puts it, “you recognize the family, but you’ve never met this watch before.”
Pick the Futur Antérieur up and the first thing that hits you is the new case: 67 components, just 8.85mm thick. With two movements sitting inside (next to each other rather than stacked) the real challenge is width rather than height, but it’s still neatly packaged, and you feel that on the wrist: it settles in flat and feels lighter than its 38mm x 44mm footprint would have you expect.
Each dial gets its own raised, riveted bezel with 12 polished yellow-gilt 1N rivets a side, and the two crowns carry six more rivets apiece. Everything here – dials, crowns, the negative space between them – is deliberately balanced. The central gap between the dials features raised plates engraved with both collaborators’ names, so they appear on the dial side as well as the caseback.
The dials themselves have two finishes: a grained centre ringed by a circular-brushed outer edge. Under flat light the two textures read as near-identical, but tilt the watch into the light and they separate, giving the face real depth. The dial at 4 o’clock handles hours and minutes, the other runs seconds alone. Both using Halter’s signature blued-steel hands, the brightest splash of colour against the Silver’s rhodium-plated dials. It’s also available in a gold coloured variant as well.
The Antiqua is where this design language started. The rivets, the porthole dials and the blued hands all trace back to it. That watch, though, ran on a single calibre: the VH198, a Lemania 8810 base that Halter stripped down and rebuilt by hand to drive a full perpetual calendar across four riveted portholes. He made only 110 between 1999 and 2016, all in precious metals, and they’ve long drifted out of reach: in June 2026, a unique pink gold example sold for CHF 960,000 (approx. £870,000) at Marteau & Co.
Futur Antérieur takes the opposite approach: each dial gets its own automatic Sellita SW100, 25 jewels, 28,800vph, with a Côtes de Genève-finished rotor and around 42 hours of power reserve. A bespoke calibre would have been the more romantic answer, but it would have pushed the price into Halter’s own territory. Two off-the-shelf movements keep it attainable: if you have the taste for his work but not the bank balance, this is your way in. Fitting them side by side without bulk is a feat in its own right. The trade-off is that the movements aren’t connected, so the seconds run independently, but fortunately both hack for setting. The decorated rotors are hidden behind a solid caseback.
The strap is blue ostrich leather with tone-on-tone stitching and a black grained calf lining, fastened with a stainless-steel pin buckle engraved with the Louis Erard symbol. It holds its own next to a case this detailed. The quick-change bars make it easy to swap in another strap, though I’d keep it on the ostrich.
The Futur Antérieur Silver costs CHF 4,950 excluding tax (approx. £4,450), limited to 178 pieces, reference 22243AA07.BOA05. As briefly mentioned, there’s also a gold edition that matches it on price and limitation, with gold-toned dials and a black ostrich strap. Want both? There’s a 78-piece Duo Set, supplied in an FSC wood box, at CHF 9,900 (approx. £8,900) – simply the two prices added together, so don’t go in expecting a discount. That price sits above many of Louis Erard’s regular collections but nowhere near what an original Antiqua now costs at auction, and that’s the real story. Two automatic movements in a Halter-style case for a fraction of what Halter’s own watches command.
Price and Specs:
More details at Louis Erard.
