De Bethune DB28xs Sea Tourbillon

Denis Flageollet’s love of the sea isn’t a marketing position. It’s the through-line of his recent work, and with the DB28xs Sea Tourbillon it surfaces in the most direct way yet. The dial is a wave of blued grade 5 titanium, hand-finished in a random guilloché pattern Denis introduced in 2023 and reserved for De Bethune itself. Light catches it the way it catches water at depth: shifting, dimensional, never the same twice.

Underneath that surface lives one of the most refined ultra-light tourbillons in modern watchmaking. The exoskeleton cage weighs 0.18 grams, comprises 63 components, runs at 36,000 vibrations per hour, and completes a full rotation in 30 seconds. Not a minute, like most tourbillons. Thirty seconds. Combined with the calibre’s self-regulating twin barrel (a 2004 De Bethune innovation), the silicon escape wheel, and the patented flat-terminal-curve balance spring, you get over five days of power reserve and a movement built for how watches are actually worn today: through magnetic fields, through impacts, through accelerations.

The case is the version of the DB28 we’ve been waiting for. Trimmed to 38.7mm and just 8mm thick, fully mirror-polished in grade 5 titanium, with the patented floating lugs (a 2006 De Bethune patent) that wrap to the wrist regardless of size. It’s the kind of comfort that makes you forget you’re wearing haute horlogerie.

The DB2009v7 is visible front and back through double anti-reflective sapphire, framed in blued titanium and finished by hand. Microlight surfaces, polished bevels, blued screws. The Sea Tourbillon doesn’t tell time so much as render it: a blue world in constant motion, every thirty seconds another full revolution.