Watches inspired by architecture have become something of a genre. Jaeger-LeCoultre have referenced the Chrysler Building, Richard Mille the Elbe Philharmonic Hall, and Toledano & Chan the work of Marcel Breuer at the Whitney Museum. What all of those have in common is that the buildings exist. The Hotel Attraction never did.
The Hotel Attraction was designed by Antoni Gaudí in 1908 for a site in Manhattan. At 360 metres tall, organic, futuristic, and unlike anything on the skyline it would have joined, it was abandoned before construction began and forgotten almost immediately. Lebond, marking the centenary of Gaudí’s death, have quietly brought it back.
The Attraction has a 38mm Grade 5 titanium case weighing just 33 grams, it’s remarkably light and you notice that immediately on the wrist. The micro-sanded matte finish gives it a clean, understated look and the anti-fingerprint coating keeps it looking clean in daily wear. The case flows into the lugs without a hard edge in sight, making it comfortable to wear and easy to forget you have it on. It also features a small onion-shaped crown on the right side. At 10.4mm thick and 46mm lug-to-lug, it sits neatly on the wrist without feeling oversized.
The dial draws inspiration from a top view of the Hotel Attraction and displays time in an unconventional way. Still photographs won’t do it justice; you need the watch on your wrist and light overhead. It’s built up in layers. At the base is a disc with a railroad minute track, above that a second disc with a luminous marker pointing to the hours, then a white hand extending to the minute track, and finally a rotating top disc that replaces the traditional seconds hand. Both the hand and the marker are finished with Grade A Swiss Super-LumiNova in blue, which perform well in low light. As you move your wrist, the discs catch the light at different angles, and what looks flat in photos turns out to have real depth to it. The brushed finishing is directional too, so the seconds disc doesn’t visibly sweep. Instead, you track its rotation by the way the brush marks catch the light as it turns. Once you notice it, you’ll keep tilting your wrist to see it again.
The Attraction comes in two editions. The Original pairs a brushed silver dial with a light brown Nappa leather strap, while the Dark swaps in a brushed anthracite dial and black strap for a moodier look, both fastened with a titanium folding clasp with stainless steel blades.
Flip the watch over and the open sapphire caseback reveals the ETA 2892-A2, the same movement that powered the inaugural Lebond Siza and its follow-up, the Souto Moura. It’s notably slim, accurate, and dependable, and the 50-hour power reserve is better than you’d expect. For a watch this focused on how it looks, an unobtrusive movement that just gets on with it is probably the right call. But printed onto the sapphire above it is the top view of the Hotel Attraction, and that’s where your eye ends up anyway. I kept turning it over longer than I needed to.
We didn’t get hands-on with the wooden exhibition box, so we’re going on Lebond’s own information here. The idea is simple enough: a scale model of the upper section of the Hotel Attraction, 42cm tall, 3kg, hand-turned in sapele wood by a master turner in Barcelona. Each one takes twenty hours to make, which becomes easier to believe when you look at it, 12 vertical and 24 horizontal lines, all shaped by hand, with the catenary curves Gaudí was so fond of reproduced exactly. It costs €1,600 excluding taxes. That’s a lot for a watch box, but then it’s not really a watch box, it’s a sculpture of an imaginary skyscraper that happens to have a watch inside it. Whether that justifies the price is between you and your bank account.
The Lebond Attraction is available now at €2,400 excluding taxes. If Gaudí’s work means anything to you, it’s worth your time and if it doesn’t, it’s still a cool watch.
Price and Specs:
More details at Lebond.
