Patek Philippe Calatrava Review: Still The Quintessential Luxury Dress Watch?

More than 90 years ago, Patek Philippe launched the watch that would become its signature, the legendary Calatrava — informed by Bauhaus simplicity, conceived of economic pragmatism, and boldly establishing the template for scores of men’s dress watches to follow. Today’s Calatrava collection is vast, comprising numerous high complications, but the basic time-only dress version remains the gateway drug for many a budding Patek enthusiast. In 2025, Patek Philippe unveiled the latest version, the salmon-dialed Ref. 6916, which represents the culmination of many decades’ worth of evolution on both the aesthetic and technical sides. Here is the story behind the Calatrava, and why it has become an undisputed icon of understated luxury.

Reference 96 (1932)

In the throes of the Great Depression, a new era was dawning for one of the great horological houses of Switzerland. Like much of the rest of the watch industry, Patek Philippe, which traced its prestigious history all the way back to 1839, had fallen on hard times by 1932. That was the year that brothers Jean and Charles Stern, founders of Fabrique de Cadrans Stern Frères, a successful Swiss dial-making factory and a longtime supplier for Patek Philippe, acquired the latter company and swiftly began the work of updating its product portfolio. In a modern age increasingly dominated by the wristwatches that had surged in popularity since the end of World War I, Patek’s output still largely consisted of ornate, highly complicated pocket watches that were priced beyond the reach of most consumers; the Sterns were determined to change the narrative and reach out to a wider audience in those economically troubled times.

Differing from many of the other large Swiss watchmaking maisons at the time — which still regarded the rise of the wristwatch as a passing fad — the Sterns embraced the needs of changing times with the development of the Reference 96 wristwatch. Released in 1932, the same year as the family’s acquisition of its erstwhile client — and just three years before Charles’s son Henri headed to New York, eventually to establish Patek’s sole United States distributor, the Henri Stern Watch Agency — the Ref. 96 was historically noteworthy in several respects. It was the first serially produced Patek Philippe watch with an official, trackable serial number. It was one of the first watch designs to bear strong influence from the Bauhaus movement, which had emerged from Germany in 1919, spearheaded by the eponymous art school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar. And it was the watch model that is today regarded as the very first in the long line of time-only wristwatches to bear the name Calatrava — which would not, in fact, be used in Patek’s marketing and branding until much later.

Ref. 96; photo: Sotheby's

The Ref. 96 watch laid the foundations not only for the Calatrava, Patek Philippe’s signature dress watch for nearly a century, but also for many round, elegant wristwatches that would follow it. Its central elements are now so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine how revolutionary they were at the time. The watch’s softly rounded case middle was designed to flow seamlessly into the lugs, setting it stylistically apart from most other wristwatches of the era, which were still adaptations of their pocket watch ancestors, with the lugs distinctively separate from the midcase. The diminutive case dimensions — 31mm in diameter and 9mm thick, much too small for a pocket watch — also helped in this regard.

Caliber 12-120: photo: Collectability

The dials of the earliest models featured a subdial at 6 o’clock for running seconds, the central seconds display having not yet come into common usage in watches. Dial details on the earliest models included choices like Dauphine or leaf-shaped hands, Breguet-style Arabic or Roman numerals, and trapezoidal or baton hour markers. The very first Ref. 96 watches used an outsourced movement from LeCoultre, but starting in 1934, subsequent models contained the Caliber 12-120, which was among the first Patek Philippe calibers made in-house. Bringing vertical integration to Patek Philippe was a driving motivation of the Stern brothers from the beginning of their stewardship of the maison, and the first Calatrava represented an early statement of this mission.

Reference 570 (1938)

Ref. 570; photo: Sotheby's

Patek Philippe introduced the next “proto-Calatrava,” Ref. 570, in 1938, a watch that was essentially an upsized version of its genre-defining Ref. 96. Its case measured 35.5mm in diameter, with the same flowing midcase-to-lugs execution. Like the Ref. 96, the Ref. 570 offered versatility in its aesthetic details: central seconds or small seconds subdial at 6 o’clock; baton-style or Breguet-style hands and indexes; very clean or sectored dials. The central-seconds models carried the Patek Philippe Caliber 12-120 SC or 27SC (the “SC” designating “seconde centrale”); the sub-seconds version housed the Caliber 12-200 or its successor, Caliber 12-400, which was introduced in 1949. The 35.5mm sizing was another example of Patek Philippe recognizing the changing tastes and trends of the consumer as the Depression began waning and the WWII years approached. The 570, retroactively dubbed the Calatrava 570, was produced, alongside its smaller predecessor the Ref. 96, for more than 30 years, with the final models hitting retailers’ shelves in 1972. 

Reference 3919 (1985)

Ref. 3919; photo:  Antiquorum

Anyone who’s read a lot of these historical retrospectives on classical Swiss watch models could probably predict what was coming next: the onset of the Quartz Crisis in the 1970s and ‘80s, which presented nearly as big of a threat as the Great Depression to heritage Swiss watch brands that were striving to remain relevant, much less solvent. Patek Philippe answered the challenge with a revamped and now legendary evolution of the dress watch that had started it all, the Ref. 96 — or, more granularly, the Ref. 96D that had followed it up a few years later. In 1985, Patek introduced the Ref. 3919, fondly remembered as the quintessential “banker’s watch” in that era of yuppies and conspicuous consumerism. Industry legend has it that the watch’s signature design choices — particularly the hobnail-textured “Clou de Paris” bezel, an element taken from that short-lived 96D reference, and which replaced the more common coin-edged bezel of more recent models — were heavily influenced by the suggestions of a Geneva-based advertising executive, René Bittel, who described his archetypical Patek Philippe watch to the company’s then-CEO, Henri Stern’s son, Philippe Stern.

Ref. 3919; photo: Sotheby's

At 33mm, the Ref. 3919 was smaller than the Ref. 570 but a bit larger than the original Ref. 96, hitting a stylistic sweet spot for that decade. The aforementioned engine-turned bezel was decidedly a distinguishing feature, but not one that was overly ostentatious. The painted black Roman numerals and black-oxidized, leaf-shaped gold hands added an additional layer of classical elegance. Patek Philippe fitted the watch with its manual-winding Caliber 215, which had been rolled out in 1974 as the successor to Caliber 12-120. Still used in some Calatrava models, and in the Art Deco-influenced Gondolo pieces, it was the first movement to incorporate Patek’s patented Gyromax balance wheel, a mainstay of its manufacture calibers today.

Reference 5196 and 5119 (2004 - 2006)

Ref. 5196; photo: Antiquorum

The Quartz Crisis gave way to the Mechanical Watch Renaissance (capitalization mine) as the industry entered the new millennium. With this revival, whose scope would have been unfathomable to many beleaguered watch executives in the late 1970s and ‘80s, came a trend toward larger sizes that would peak sometime in the 2010s. The Calatrava (which was now being officially called by that name, a reference to Patek Philippe’s longtime emblem, the Calatrava cross) would not be immune to the trend. The Ref. 5196 released in 2004 measured 37mm in diameter — not enormous, especially by the standards of the time, but certainly larger than any Patek Philippe gents’ dress watch that preceded it (notwithstanding the legendary Nautilus, which belongs more in the “luxury sport watch” category). The watch resurrected the Dauphine hands, subsidiary seconds, and faceted indexes of earlier models and added the elegant touch of applied dots on the minutes track. It used the same manual-winding Caliber 215 as the much smaller Ref. 3919, however, so the 6 o’clock subdial was placed closer to the center of the dial than some enthusiasts preferred. The watch also had a plain, closed caseback rather than the clear exhibition back that was already becoming widespread, most likely a nod to the fact that a Calatrava was often given as a gift and could be personalized with a caseback engraving. 

Ref. 5119; photo: Bonhams

On the heels of this model, in 2006, came the Ref. 5119, also containing the manually wound Caliber 215, which reduced the size just a smidgen to 36mm and added an open caseback. If the Ref. 5196 was a 21st-Century take on the “original” Calatrava, the storied Ref. 96, the 5119 was a contemporary version of the ‘80s “Banker’s Watch,” the 3919, bringing back the Roman numerals and, significantly, the Clous de Paris hobnail bezel. Both these references, and the historical DNA behind them, set the stage for the most recent iterations of the Calatrava.

Reference 6119 (2021)

Perhaps recalling the original mandate of the Ref. 96 wristwatch — to provide a more widely accessible timepiece for consumers muddling through the Depression — Patek Philippe unveiled the watch that would become its most “entry-level” men’s dress watch option in 2021, the Calatrava Ref. 6119 (of course, with Patek, “entry-level” is defined on a very sliding scale: its MSRP is $35,600). The 6119R (“R” for “rose gold”) resurrected the venerable hobnail bezel along with the other longtime hallmarks of the Calatrava. These included a round, meticulously polished case, here at a very contemporary 39mm size; a harmoniously balanced dial offered with either Roman numerals of applied gold indexes; finely faceted Dauphine hands; and a 6 o’clock small-seconds subdial with a retro-style railroad minute track that evokes the Calatrava’s 1930s origins. Patek Philippe put a newer, larger, but still manually wound in-house movement in this timepiece, Caliber 30-255 PS, with an enhanced power reserve of 65 hours and a host of high-horology finishing.

Reference 6196P (2025)

All of which brings us, finally, to the most recent release in the core Calatrava family, 2025’s Reference 6196P, which eschews the hobnail bezel for one that is smooth, beveled and polished, and added an exquisite, opaline dial that Patek refers to as “rose gilt” but that many enthusiasts might call “salmon.” But these aren’t the only factors that make this latest Calatrava — which proved to be a sleeper hit among attendees of the 2025 Watches & Wonders fair, despite being released alongside more than a dozen other, far more complicated Patek Philippe pieces — so special.

Its 38mm case is made of platinum, a rare precious metal even for Patek (and the justification for its emphatically non-entry-level price of $56,900), with polished surfaces complementing satin-brushed flanks. The case is elegantly slender at just 9.33mm tall, has slender, tapering lugs, and resists water to a modest but acceptable 30 meters. The rose-gilt opaline dial features its own high-contrast take on the classical Calatrava design, with a charcoal-gray finish on both the white-gold, “obus” hour markers and the faceted Dauphine hands cut from the same precious metal. The 6 o’clock subdial, with its hand and markers also in a contrasting dark shade, is placed ideally above the index and below the center of the hands, allowing the dial to breathe more than the “cramped” dial of its direct predecessor, the 5196. 

The reason for that breathing room, of course, is the use of Caliber 30-255 PS inside the platinum case. It measures 31mm in diameter compared to Caliber 215’s 21.9mm, but maintains the same understated profile, just 2.55mm thick. Its plates and bridges are graced with wide-set côtes de Genève, its patented Spiromax balance beats at 4 Hz, or 28,800 vph, and its twin mainspring barrels store a power reserve of 65 hours. On the technical side, Caliber 30-255 incorporates a stop-seconds function enabling precise time setting, and, like all current Patek Philippe movements, meets the strict technical and decorative criteria for the maison’s in-house Patek Philippe Seal, which include a daily accuracy of -3/+2 seconds, superior to the industry standard COSC chronometer certification. As it saunters deliberately toward a full century in production, the Patek Philippe Calatrava continues to prove that even the most simple and classical of designs can still find new ways to impress. You can learn more at patek.com.