A Honeygold Take on the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater
Oh, and a new flagship boutique too…
There are few brands whose new releases excite me more than those of A. Lange & Söhne. The German brand, which has been operating in its revived state for just shy of three decades (in fact, today — October 24 — is the 29th anniversary of that revival), offers a combination of quality and identity that is hard to ignore — and even harder to dislike. Today, Lange offered up two new releases, one a watch, the other decidedly larger.
Starting with the watch, what we have is a new iteration of the A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk Minute Repeater. Fundamentally, not much has changed, but in execution, this is a whole new world for arguably the most exciting digital watch on the market.
The Zeitwerk Minute Repeater is not a new watch by any definition. The original platinum execution was released in 2015, and a white gold iteration with a deep blue dial was released in 2020 — and those weren’t even the first chiming watches to come out of the Lange stable. In the dozen or so years since the introduction of the Zeitwerk Striking Time there have been several iterations of both that model and the Zeitwerk Decimal Strike.
And I am the first to admit that releasing a watch in a new case metal does not necessarily merit any amount of digital ink, but minute repeaters are different, and the A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk Minute Repeater in Honeygold has a couple of things going for it that mean it has to be discussed.
The first is practical — this is a limited edition of 30, so if you want it, I’d make it known to your local Lange boutique sooner than later (I have a feeling these won’t be sitting around while you make up your mind). The second is emotional — there is nothing quite like a Honeygold Lange, and I require very little convincing to talk your ear off about them.
The third, and probably most important, reason to discuss this new Zeitwerk is technical. Different metals have vastly different resonant qualities, and the sound of a minute repeater can be vastly impacted by the material used in its case. Put the same movement in a different case, you get a different sound. Simple as that.
So how does the Honeygold A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk Minute Repeater sound? Well, to steal a line from Van Morrison, the watch sounds “as sweet as Tupelo honey.” While it is not the loudest minute repeater I’ve ever come across (it’s hard to beat an AP Supersonnerie in that regard), the Honeygold Zeitwerk has a crisp, pure tone, not lacking for a second in warmth or appeal.
In some ways the tone of the sound produced by the Honeygold Zeitwerk Minute Repeater mirrors what makes the material itself so appealing. Where platinum minute repeaters produce an incredibly clear tone, and golds tend to be ever-so-slightly muddled but with an appealing warmth and impressive volume. The Zeitwerk Minute Repeater balances these traits perfectly, in the same way that Honeygold seems to offer the perfect balance of color and durability between platinum, rose, and yellow gold. (If you want to learn more about proprietary gold alloys, you can read about them here, and if you’d like to dive deeper into the technical properties that make the Zeitwerk Minute Repeater stand out, you can read Jack Forster’s take on the platinum version in this A Watch A Week).
All told, it’s a fantastic watch with massive appeal from a brand that has a better sense of themselves than most others today, something which is reflected in their new flagship boutique on the southeast corner of 63rd and Madison.
Beautiful and modern, A. Lange & Söhne has transformed the space at 709 Madison Ave. (which used to be the New York City home of Chopard) into a fantastic representation of the brand, complete with a dramatically large facsimile of the Saxonia Triple Split measuring — if I had to take a guess, which I don’t but will — about 2,500mm across (between 50-60x the case diameter of the standard Triple Split).
The space also includes several well-appointed lounge spaces and, upstairs, a small “apartment” where watchmakers can do on-site service and other work. Many of these details help to establish a new vocabulary and design language for Lange boutiques, and each location will continue to evolve as new locations are built out.