Gatherings Up Close & Personal With A. Lange & Söhne

Every A. Lange & Söhne leaves Glashütte with a balance cock that has been engraved entirely by hand, which means no two are ever quite the same. It's one of those facts you can read a hundred times and think you understand it, until someone puts a graver in your hand and invites you to try.

That was the premise of the afternoon before our event with the brand in Sydney, when the Hodinkee Australia & New Zealand team sat down with one of A. Lange & Söhne's master engravers: Robert Arnold, one of only 6 engravers employed by A. Lange & Söhne, who flew all the way from Germany to be with us.

We were each presented with a Lange watchmaker's jacket, our names embroidered above the breast pocket, which felt like a generous vote of confidence given that none of us had held a graver before. Then came the balance cocks, which fortunately for us were oversized versions and considerably larger than the components that leave the manufacture.

Anyone who’s ever held an A. Lange & Söhne in their hands shouldn’t be surprised to hear that engraving is an extremely difficult exercise, if only because of how fine the margins of error are. A cut that looks decent from the eye reveals itself under magnification as being a fraction of a millimetre too wide, and the difference between a clean line and a ruined one is a moment's hesitation or a mistimed exhale.

Robert moved through his patterns like the metal was butter, but the rest of us worked slowly, building respect with every passing minute for the people who do this every day. Everyone left with a certificate of completion and the balance cock they'd engraved. Imperfect, but immediately recognisable as our own work (no one was ready to quit their day jobs).

The following evening brought a rather more polished affair, with a tightly held guest list of some of Sydney's most serious collectors, welcomed to the city's recently opened A. Lange & Söhne boutique with Ruinart and canapés by our team. We spoke about the house itself, tracing the brand’s founding in Glashütte in 1845, the decades when the name disappeared entirely, and the 1990 revival that brought it back. Then we unveiled the cover of Hodinkee Australia & New Zealand Vol. 1, our first print edition, which nobody outside the room had seen and is set to go on sale in the first week of August (so stay tuned!)

Update: Hodinkee Australia & New Zealand Vol. 1 is live now - find out more here.

From there, the evening belonged to the watches, with guests invited to watch our engraving instructor at work through a microscope projected onto a screen. In addition to the engraving demonstration, the A. Lange & Söhne had arranged for an extremely rare collection of Handwerkskunst pieces to be present, cementing the evening as one that a few guests will remember for a long while yet. These remarkable watches are the brand's rarest expressions of hand-finishing, and pieces you might spend a collecting life without ever encountering in the metal.

Witnessing that level of engraving, after having spent a few hours failing to come anywhere near a similar result, confirmed exactly what makes A. Lange & Söhne so remarkable as a watchmaker. Admiration in the abstract is one thing, but a true understanding of exactly how much has gone into every surface is another altogether.

A big thanks to the entire A. Lange & Söhne team who made both events possible, and as this was the first of a series we'll be running with the brand, it would be an understatement to say we weren’t excited for the next editions...