There are few watches which could stand alone as a logo for their brand. The NOMOS Glashütte Tangente 38 is one of those timepieces.

An icon of confident style and straightforward elegance, the Tangente 38 is the archetypal NOMOS watch. Referred to as “a timepiece for people with culture”, it has earned multiple international awards for style and design, proving that classic looks paired with modern technology produce an outstanding wristwatch.

The combination of modern European design and restrained proportions allows the NOMOS Glashütte Tangente 38 to appear minimal without being sterile, and modern without being brash. Crafted in traditional German Bauhaus style, the Tangente 38 is pure of design, free of ornamentation and excess. Traditional Bauhaus design sought to remove “distinction between monumental and decorative art” and integrate various disciplines into a single design.

Started in Weimar, Germany by architect Walter Gropius in 1919, the Bauhaus school had deep impacts in architecture, graphic design, and typography. Bauhaus had, at the core, a harmony between design and function. The results were buildings which were simultaneously artistic and functional in their architecture. NOMOS embodies the Bauhaus school of thought in watchmaking. With a focus on minimalism in the typefaces and efficient case design, NOMOS Glashütte strikes a balance between legibility and good lucks.

Regarded as the watch of choice for architects’ and writers’ the world over, the Tangente 38 houses an in-house movement called the NOMOS Alpha caliber. A small, manually-wound movement with a 43-hour power reserve, the Alpha features a stop-seconds mechanism, Incabloc shock protection, rhodium-plated movement surfaces, and is packed into a diameter of 23.3mm at a height of 2.6mm, making it incredibly thin. The Alpha caliber is housed in a stainless-steel case measuring 35mm.

While the interior of the NOMOS Tangente 38 is impressive, the design history and attention to detail really shine on the surface. The white dial is ringed by even numbered Arabic hour numerals in a classically modern typeface. The six o’clock position is replaced by a seconds dial featuring the same baton-styled indices that mark the odd hours on the larger watch face. Blued steel hands are used for the hour and minute hands, as well as the seconds hand in the sub dial. The slim hands are only slightly thicker than the hour indices, providing a clean and elegant look to the watch face.

Stamped with NOMOS Glashütte under the number 12, the watch face relays what fans of the brand know well, NOMOS makes nearly 95% of it's movement in-house, enriching the long history of watchmaking in the Saxony, Germany town of Glashütte. The small “Made in Germany” stamped below the six o’clock marker finishes the classic watch face of the Tangente 38. Completed by a Horween shell black Cordovan leather strap, the NOMOS Tangente 38 is a classically styled modern masterpiece of watchmaking for under $2400 (with a sapphire caseback, $2030 with a stainless steel caseback).

See it in our Palo Alto now.