Roger Dubuis Emphasises The Impact Of Its New Hommage With A One-Off Special Edition
The Roger Dubuis Hommage “Sukoon Al-Layl” is a cool and darkly mysterious take on the attractive retro stylings of its recent tribute watch.
About two weeks before the start of Dubai Watch Week, Roger Dubuis electrified the watch community by releasing something much closer to its roots: the Hommage La Placide. Although the modern-day Roger Dubuis is a manufacture built around the action-hero hyperwatch, this was instead a considered tribute to its namesake founder, who established the company in 1995. The Hommage La Placide feels very much like a watch of that era: it features an easy-wearing 38mm round case, a perpetual calendar movement using a module from the late 1990s, and retrograde displays that draw heavily on Monsieur Dubuis’ own distinctive aesthetic.
Presented in pink gold with a blue lacquer dial, the Hommage La Placide exudes a certain retro swagger. For Dubai Watch Week 2025, the brand demonstrates the flexibility of the design by dressing it in something different. The Hommage “Sukoon Al-Layl” is the same watch, but with a platinum case and dark guilloché dial, giving it a markedly different demeanour—cooler, more introverted, more contemporary. The dial colour is officially called Astral Blue, intended to “capture the stillness of the night sky just before dawn”, but in practice it reads more like a dark grey. The dial’s wave texture is a callback to Roger Dubuis’ early creations and provides a hypnotic lustre.
The emblematic elliptical retrograde display tracks and the flange are rendered in dark mother-of-pearl, and one of the subtle differences compared to La Placide is the use of simple dot markers for the minutes track. The moonphase is backed by an aventurine base and topped with two domed yellow gold moons. As before, the five stacked layers of these dial elements impart the timepiece with a surprising amount of depth; this, combined with the inherent complexity of perpetual calendar movements, means that its 11mm thickness comes as a welcome surprise. The brand’s customary Poinçon de Genève certification, marked also with a seal on the dial side, is a testament to the extreme finishing and performance standards to which the movement is built.
This timepiece would make a fine counterpart to the La Placide version—one for elegant evenings, the other for laid-back daytimes, for instance. Although that watch is already hard enough to acquire as a 28-piece limited edition, “Sukoon Al-Layl” is even more elusive, as it is a unique piece.
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