Every year Oris releases a Hölstein Edition, named after the Swiss village where the company has made watches since 1904. It is the brand's chance to show what it would build with no commercial brief, and the 2026 edition, introduced on June 17, does something the line has not done before: it is the first watch in the redesigned Artelier collection, and the first to run a movement from the in-house Calibre 400 family.
The dial
At a glance it reads as a plain grey-dial dress watch. The detail is in the markers and the running seconds. The hour markers are wedge-shaped, tapering and polished to throw light, a shape Oris drew from indices it used in the 1960s. At six o'clock the small-seconds sits in a sunken sub-dial with a mirror finish, and the seconds hand running across it is red, the one piece of colour on the front of the watch. The hands and markers are otherwise rhodium, and the dial is a soft light grey that shifts with the light rather than staying flat.
The movement
Inside is the Calibre 401, part of the Calibre 400 series Oris launched in 2020 and has been rolling out across its collections since. It is a hand-finished automatic with twin barrels giving a five-day, 120-hour power reserve, strong anti-magnetic resistance, and a rated accuracy of minus three to plus five seconds a day, within chronometer tolerance. The series also carries Oris's ten-year warranty and a recommended ten-year service interval, which is the practical argument for the calibre: not just the long reserve, but how rarely the watch needs to come back. The 401 is the time-and-small-seconds layout in the family, the right configuration for a dress watch.
The caseback
The Hölstein Editions usually hide a detail on the back, and this year it is the Oris bear. The brand's mascot is engraved at the centre of the sapphire caseback, surrounded by a surface Oris has laser-treated so that it behaves like a thin-film mirror: depending on the angle of the light, the rings and lettering shift through the spectrum, blue to green to gold. The inscription reads Hölstein Edition 2026, and each caseback is individually numbered out of 250. It is a quiet piece of theatre on a watch that is otherwise restrained.
Price and the read
The case is a multi-piece stainless steel construction, 39.5mm across, 11.10mm thick and 45.5mm lug to lug, on a brown suede strap. It is limited to 250 numbered pieces at EUR 3,800, the same in Swiss francs, and USD 4,600 in the United States. That is more than a standard steel Artelier, and the premium buys the limited run, the caseback and the calibre. For a buyer who wants the five-day Calibre 400 in a genuinely dressy, sub-40mm case rather than a diver or a bronze field watch, this is the cleanest expression Oris has put it in.
