Reporting for Esquire Magazine with an incisiveness and level of playful snark on par with some of the best of Jack Forster's work, Chris Hall takes a tour the heart and soul of Omega's vast, Swiss headquarters, designed by Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban.

I admire that Hall was bold enough to ask Omega CEO, Raynald Aeschlimann, point-blank, for his thoughts on the move Rolex made to cut the perceived esteem of Omega's METAS certification down a notch by qualifying multiple references from its sister brand's appreciably less expensive Tudor Black Bay Collection through the program. Parrying the joust, in what looked to be a near fumble but finished with a practiced and polished answer, Aeschlimann clearly wasn't pleased by the deft play of his prime competitor:

I don’t want to say ‘pleased’ — for me the most important thing was that one of the brands of the Rolex group was considering [master-chronometer certification] as a new standard in the watch industry. Making that step was quite positive news for watchmaking.