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October 18, 2024This post was originally published on this site
Benoît Mintiens of Ressence thought he would never recover his cherished prototype watches that were among 14 taken from his home in a 2014 robbery. But then he got a message.
It was a Sunday morning in May when the message that Benoît Mintiens thought might never arrive popped up on his phone. In it were photographs of three beaten-up watches, one with a smashed crystal that had been crudely patched with tape, another with a badly faded dial.
But in Mr. Mintiens’s mind, there was no doubt. These were three of the Ressence prototypes that had been stolen in 2014 from his home in Antwerp, Belgium, watches that he had thought he might never see again.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Mintiens, 52, said recently. “I knew immediately they were my watches. They were my babies.”
The message was from Justin Hast, a watch expert and consultant who had been working with Mr. Mintiens on “Ressence Catalogue Raisonné 2010-2023,” a retrospective of the brand’s years as an independent maker.
Mr. Hast had been sent the pictures by Toby Sutton of Watches of Knightsbridge, a London auction house; Mr. Sutton had seen the watches during a visit to Hudood al Bawadi, a watch dealership in Dubai’s Gold Souk, the labyrinthine jewelry market. The watches had not been working but the store owner, who said he did not know what they were, had valued them collectively at $12,000.
