Entrepreneur Ali Hussain Sajwani spotted wearing a Richard Mille

Ali Hussain Sajwani, managing director of DAMAC Properties — one of the Gulf region's most prominent luxury real estate developers — was recently spotted wearing what may be the single most technically daring watch Richard Mille has ever produced: the RM 27-01 Tourbillon Rafael Nadal in Quartz TPT and Carbon TPT. With only ten examples confirmed to exist, a public sighting is genuinely rare.

The Richard Mille RM 27-01 was developed in close collaboration with Rafael Nadal and first disclosed in 2018, though its release was handled with unusual discretion — no major press launch, no boutique display campaign. The defining engineering feat is its suspended movement architecture: the entire calibre hangs inside the case on a network of tensioned cables, directly inspired by suspension bridge construction. This system absorbs and distributes the violent mechanical stresses of a professional tennis serve, rated by Richard Mille's engineers to withstand shocks up to 5,000 Gs. The manual-winding tourbillon calibre, the RM27-01, beats at 21,600 vph and offers approximately 70 hours of power reserve.

The case construction is equally uncompromising. Quartz TPT — Richard Mille's proprietary material produced by layering silica filaments at 45-degree angles under compression — forms the upper section, producing a distinctive wave-pattern finish that varies across each individual piece. Carbon TPT forms the baseplate structure, delivering exceptional rigidity at minimal weight. The combination keeps the total case weight extraordinarily low while providing structural integrity that conventional materials cannot match.

For collectors, the RM 27-01 occupies a tier above almost everything else in the Richard Mille catalogue. A production run of ten pieces places it among the marque's most restrictive references, and unlike many limited editions, its technical proposition — the cable-suspended movement — is genuinely novel rather than cosmetic. Pieces from the Nadal tourbillon line consistently outperform broader Richard Mille values on the secondary market, and the RM 27-01 specifically is considered a long-term hold by serious collectors.

With a list price of $660,000 at release, the Richard Mille RM 27-01 has since crossed the one-million-dollar threshold on the grey market on the rare occasions it appears. For Ali Hussain Sajwani, a figure whose professional world centres on landmark architecture and high-stakes development, the choice of a watch literally engineered around suspended infrastructure reads as anything but coincidental.