Twelve years ago I was working for the Swatch Group and the workshop got together to buy a Nomos Tangente for one of the watchmakers (hi Odo!) as a wedding gift. Blown away by both the coolness and the quality/feel of it, I hit the internet and got even more blown away by the Nomos Orion. The promo at the time read along the lines of “at first glance you think you’ve seen it before, on an uncle or in an old movie perhaps, but on closer inspection you realise you’re looking at something different” and it stuck with me. Fast forward to New Year’s Eve 2021 and DHL delivering my first “nice” watch, a Nomos Orion 38 Grau (ref. 383).

Getting the only real negative out of the way: the size is not quite spot-on for me. I tried on a 35mm Orion a few years ago at my nearest AD (3,400km away) and it was a touch small – I have 18cm wrists but semi-monstrous hands so proportion is a tricky one to get right. 36.5mm would be pretty good but I’m not going to wait for Nomos to potentially cannibalise its product line. This said, 38mm is the only size the grey dial comes in and the dial is the big thing for me here.

While not heralding a new movement or celebrating a significant milestone, the Orion 38 Grau came out in 2013 as part of the wider Nomos Orion 38 launch (alongside Weiss and “classic”) and has remained in production since.

The grey, rhodium-plated dial is a beautiful exercise in restraint. With such a seemingly austere premise there is nowhere to hide, like arrabbiata sauce or an Avedon headshot, but Nomos have nailed the brief. Not unlike an overcast autumn sky it’s at once uniform and highly nuanced, the differential being how long you spend looking at it. Light takes it from a subdued, near-battleship grey to a subtle fleck that conjures up a tactile sensation that then really comes alive with a radiant frosting when hit with sunlight.

Admittedly, silver on grey under a domed crystal means readability is not at an all-time high but the thrill is in the chase.

I don’t really like dauphine hands (#dauphinedislikersclub) and am indifferent to leaves, swords, spades and batons so really all that remains for me to get excited about are stick, alpha and whatever F.P. Journe hands are called. Which, realistically, means stick or alpha hands for me. Fortunately, Nomos are no stranger to the stick. Further, it feels like a bit of a novelty having non-blued hands on a Nomos.

Without knowing why, I like to wear my watches quite close – no extra-ulnar bangles for me – and the long swooping lugs of the Nomos Orion 38 make it silkily glide around the wrist. PLUS, they’re drilled. I’m negligent in my research in this area but reckon drilled lugs on dress watches probably aren’t holding the majority in 2022.

Timekeeping so far is great, averaging +6.3 seconds/day for February 2022, but really what is there to say about the Alpha that hasn’t already been said? Fabulous movement; works well, looks good, feels great. The display caseback is nice but I reckon a closed one would have been a cool continuation of the front’s pensiveness. Mine’s engraved with a line from “Sometimes It Snows In April” as a sort of memento mori, derived from Prince writing/recording it while I was being born and later passing away during that same approximate window. Tenuous? Maybe. Self-indulgent? For sure.

Bottom line: I love the Nomos Orion 38! Stainless steel, manual, time only, drilled lugs, grey/silver dial, stick hands and a domed crystal… but it’s the sum of these that really does it for me – a considered, unassuming deep cut that does what it’s meant to do and looks good doing it.

(Note: Nomos released the Platingrau Tangentes while I had this in draft. Definitely check them out if you like grey dials)