Edi, Deni & Brion Shipoli

Edi and Deni went to New York with another brand’s watch already picked out for Deni. They came home instead with a limited-edition Reverso Duoface they had specifically told the boutique they weren’t buying — and it became the one watch in the house Edi still isn’t allowed to wear.

A weekend in New York with a nine-month-old Brion in tow, a watch that looked classical on one side and radically modern on the other, and a passing joke to Jaeger-LeCoultre’s CEO about naming a Reverso Memovox after himself. Edi is still waiting on that last one.

Edi and Deni wanted an engraving that meant something, not a postcard — no bridge, no mosque, no obvious skyline. Istanbul jeweler Sevan Bıçakçı turned a conversation about tea, simit, and seagulls by the Bosphorus into three tiny works of art, and one of them became theirs.

A 9 a.m. phone call in New York, a boutique appointment two hours away, and a scramble to secure a steel Reverso chronograph before that year’s allocation ran out. It ended up finding its biggest fan not in Edi, but in his son.

A steel-versus-pink-gold debate at midnight in a Geneva hotel room was settled by the youngest member of the family: four-and-a-half-year-old Brion wanted the blue one. It became the watch that now stands for the whole family’s first trip to Watches and Wonders, and their first visit to the Vallée de Joux.