The mechanical watch display box that costs more than most timepieces

If you were the sort of kid who got an expensive Christmas present and spent the whole day playing with the box it came in, the Swiss clockmaker L’Epée 1839 has your dream package – and it doesn't even have anything in it, yet costs US$12,000.

One of the odd quirks about the world of wristwatches is that it occupies an intersection between the utilitarian and the luxurious. Though you can buy a watch today for a dollar, it's very common for even inexpensive watches to come in very nice, even elaborate boxes. Some of them are so nice that I have kept the box years after the watch itself has taken up permanent residence in the back of a drawer.

There's a logic behind this. For centuries, watches were costly items of cutting-edge technology that were like having an Apollo space capsule you could carry around on your wrist. They were not only tools for telling the time. They were (and are) works of craftsmanship and beauty to be displayed and admired, status symbols, personal statements, and gifts to mark major events in one's life.

Small wonder that they often came in elaborate boxes designed along the lines of fine jewelry cases – many of which are as collectible as the timepieces they once contained.

Today, there are also watch boxes that carry out a number of functions. Some are simply a way of storing and protecting a watch when it isn't being worn. Others are essentially display cases, safes to prevent theft, or specialized devices that do things like rotate watches with automatic movements at regular intervals to keep them wound.

L’Epée 1839's unimaginatively named Mechanical Watch Box is something else again. Other boxes are meant to draw attention to the watch and show it off to its best advantage, but the Mechanical Watch Box draws attention to itself as well, although discreetly.

It's another product of a company that has made a name for itself building quirky clocks and similar items out of materials twisted into exotic shapes that are often hard to apply the proper hand finish to. In this case, the Mechanical Watch Box goes for restrained elegance. measuring 215 x 150 x 140 mm and weighing in at a hefty 3.4 kg (7.4 lb). It is crafted out of Inox stainless steel, acrylics, glass, and microfibers, with the metal parts polished, sand-blasted, satin-finished and lacquered.

The result is a clear housing with an elevated black fabric pad to hold the watch in the middle of a self-powering mechanism. When a button is pressed, the Box opens the case and the wristwatch is raised out for display or retrieval. When the cover is closed, it resets and rewinds the mechanism, so no manual winding is needed.

That may not seem like much for a $12,000 price tag and it's hard to make a rational argument for forking out that sort of gelt. However, you have to bear in mind that the Box is aimed at a market where a watch costing $15,000 is at the very low end and the high-end timepieces often go for the price of a hypercar – and they aren't even the really expensive ones.

In that sort of price range, a $12,000 box to put a watch in comes under the heading of an impulse buy. It's one of those areas where the price of an item is determined by what the buyer is willing to shell out. This doesn't just apply to people who spend enough per square centimeter of a Picasso as another does per acre of Wyoming. It's equally true of those who only buy brand name items at the supermarket at twice the price of identical generics or prefer painkillers that are colored red and sleep aids that are blue.

In other words, people are odd.

Source: L’Epée 1839