Watch Of The Week The Fine German Watch That Taught Me To Appreciate Asymmetry

I can like an interesting watch, but I don't know if I can love one.

This harsh, humorless pronouncement, which I reserve the right to – and am in fact certain to – retract at any time, very much includes asymmetrical watches. I do not like the Vacheron Constantin Historique Americain 1921. It reminds me of one of those pick-up-artist guys wearing a bucket hat slightly askew, and it deserves to be shouted at to stand up straight and fix its hat, or maybe just to throw it away. The Cartier Crash is a precocious 13-year-old's idea of inventive, though if I ever become insanely rich I will without hesitation procure several for my friend Tom who desperately wants one, may God have mercy on his soul. The Hamilton Ventura is almost tolerable, but really why not just be a regular Hamilton? Those are much nicer.

One day not long ago, looking over the HODINKEE inventory and thinking about what I might be able to convince the brass to let me take out for a spin, I was surprised when my greedy eye paused upon a watch which fell into the above category – which is to say, interesting. Granted, the Glashütte Original PanoMaticLunar with a forest green dial was not the most radical thing ever. It's no Urwerk. The 40mm case itself was a soothing and correct circle, and its 12 o'clock pointed due north, but aside from that, it was definitely flirting with chaos.

The hours and minutes – the central thesis of the argument, if you will – were off-center, and the bottom of the main time display was overlapped by a running small-seconds subdial. The oversized date window was where four o'clock would have been if all hell had not already broken loose. The moonphase, in a more classic crescent aperture, takes up the space that between what would normally be two and three o'clock.

I realize green is a trendy dial color right now. Google "green watch" and you will find many fine suitors – for instance, Breitling's cool Premiere Heritage in pistachio (I think "manzanita" is more specific, but no one consulted me), plus the Wes Anderson-history-class vibe of Shinola's Runwell Automatic, in hunter mixed with orange. There are the green IWCs that almost look like the Glashütte and which, granted, I have not seen in person, and so to say that this Glashütte green stands out is unscientific. But I will say it anyway. 

This is the green of a Hobbit's dream, the green of a spring christening in Wales, the green of the creme de menthe your grandmother used to put on your vanilla ice cream so you'd watch Wheel of Fortune without complaining.

The watch was procured. The watch arrived, with several layers of Styrofoam security and was, as advertised, extremely green. I put it on. Or, I tried to put it on. I am not a small woman, but I have small wrists, and this watch strap was not made for them. The first inch-and-a-half of strap after the lug attachment on both sides appeared to have rigor mortis. Plus, unrelated but also not good in the whole "actually wearing the thing" department, the deployant clasp didn't click very satisfyingly, or close at all.

I had one of those "is it me or is it you?" moments that happens with a lot of purchases, but that with a luxury good is always somehow more embarrassing, due to the inevitable "it must be me because I am the only trashy one here" feeling. "Is the little pin supposed to fit in the holes?" I wrote to the watch's handler. He said it was. After pushing hard on the darn thing and getting nowhere, I realized that none of this was my fault, and no longer cared very much. I mean, if you really wanted this watch, and it seemed like a very cool watch – surely someone could figure this out. For the record, however, I would like to say that deployant clasps are incredibly stupid and whoever invented them is a sadist. What is wrong with a regular watch strap, does everything really need to be improved on with something worse, she asked rhetorically.

That said, once I got the thing on, it was more or less comfortable on my wrist, if large, solid, and heavy, and the brown strap was perfect with the green, as natural and eternal a match as leaves and bark.

In person, I was pleased to see that the asymmetry and the greenness were the only flashy elements. The watch managed to keep it classy because all the other details were plain. I liked the muted contrast of the brushed stainless-steel sides of the case, and also the sturdy lugs with their polished tops, and also the plain stick indices. All of this was, in my view, right and good. 

It took me more than a week of wearing this watch to notice that the hands were sharpened to points and inlaid with a little bit of white enamel, the same color as the moonphase. But after I noticed it, I admired it.

This is, at 40 mm, may be more of a guy's watch than a woman's watch, but it's the sort of guy thing I like. Slightly masculine but pretty is not my only wheelhouse, it's my predominant aesthetic vibe: I like Chelsea boots, Chanel men's cologne, a chilled Barbera in a bodega glass. This watch suited me the way all those things do.

People who have Rolex watches tell me that there's no feeling like looking down at your wrist and reading that mega-iconic word, and I have no reason to doubt them. But I have to say, after immersing myself in Glashütte lore, it was no small thrill to look down at the white script, with its insouciant H on that green dégradé dial, and to let my chest puff up at thoughts of this brand's own impressive lineage. 

"The road to Glashütte is long, winding, and beautiful," wrote HODINKEE's own Nicholas Manousos in a 2015 article, which went in-depth on the company's history. Long story short: People have been making watches and watch parts in the Ore Valley, near Dresden, since the mid-1800s, and Ferdinand Adolph Lange, of A. Lange & Söhne, was the pioneer. Glashütte watches were so well-made and popular that they were copied, hence the name Glashütte Original. After World War Two, Glashütte (the town) was incorporated into East Germany, or the GDR, and the four major watch companies merged into one, VEB Glashütter Uhrenbetriebe (GUB), which had a reputation for making very accurate and very thin movements. Because of the company's isolation from the outside world, they had to make all of their own parts, and it wasn't just to be cool, they had to. When the GDR once again became Germany, Glashütte Original succeeded the GUB, and that tradition continues.

Now, I'm no expert on what makes one Teutonic movement better than the next, but I do know that I am into things being homemade. I don't make box cakes or use margarita mix, I'd buy art from a ten-year-old before I got it at Costco, and even though I think ETA movements have their place, to me they seem a little sad trombone. 

I was capable of observing (or confirming the existence after reading about it in an article) the watch's off-center skeletonized rotor, which matches its off-center dial. The regulator is said to resemble a double swan's neck. I will confess that asymmetry becomes more attractive to me when symmetry is brought into it. I do indeed see something that looks like a swans' necks, and it's the very opposite of sad trombone.

This PanoMaticLunar (would have liked to have seen an editor here, just saying) was released in 2020 and the only thing new about this model is the color. The guts of the watch haven't changed much since it was released in 2003. The first watch in the Pano series started in 2001 with the PanoRetroGraph (clearly the SameCopywriterIsStillThere), which had a 30-second flywheel with an alarm. I could really use one of those things as I (and probably many people) feel my entire life can be broken down into 30-minute intervals. This watch would be cooler if it had that, but I'm not saying it's not already cool.

I have never had a watch with a moon phase. Not sure I have ever even touched one. This one adjusts with a soft pusher, like a pencil, and it looked simple enough, all I needed to do was find out the moon phase we were in: Waning crescent. I had to push the thing like 23 times to get there. I'm assuming there's a way to get the watch to the exact moment of waning crescent that we're in, and I plan on doing that later, after I've talked to Nick about my raise.

The watch seemed very thick, so thick that I looked it up and discovered it was exactly 12.7mm. The dial also looked enormous. In due time, I realized that part of its size was an optical illusion because the bezel was almost non-existent – it was like how a thin-crust pizza can look bigger than one with a thicker crust. Everything about this watch was well-proportioned, though large enough that I wouldn't recommend having more than one drink and trying to walk through a door making an argument while wearing this thing, though the watch managed to survive in my home even when this happened nearly every day.

I guess the worst thing about this watch, it seems, is the potential threat of the grumblers who say it's too much like the Lange 1. But the only way that's a drawback is if such a criticism matters to you. And it really didn't matter to me. Or at least I didn't think it did. 

Then I looked at some Lange 1s in a store in Geneva, and those Lange 1 Moon Phases are upsettingly amazing. But at $48,400 the Langes would not only draw blood, pricewise, they would draw and quarter me and leave me at sea for the sharks. So if I want an asymmetrical but still classically nice watch, this would have to be it – and it would have to be green, because Lange doesn't make theirs in green, though if they did I'm sure it would be stunning. They could make it in neon pink and it would probably still be nicer than the Glashütte Original PanoMaticLunar.

But four times nicer? I don't think so. The green gradient dial is pretty nuts. It reminded me of looking through a pine forest in late afternoon, with its varied hues – the brighter, shinier green where a digger pine's long needles reflect the sunlight, and then the darker green, going almost black, where the cedars absorb it. It's a color that makes you feel cozy, optimistic, and free.