The Chronograph Sternglas's Fans Wouldn't Stop Asking For: The Hamburg Chrono Silver Is Great Looking, Considered, And Well Priced

Sternglas has a special deal for readers of It’s About Time. Promocode is 10% for the whole collection: ABOUTTIME10

The gun goes off at exactly ten past ten. Five seconds later, twelve boats have crossed the line, their white sails snapping as they catch the wind off the Alster, a right tributary of the Elbe river right next to Hamburg. From the shore, someone starts a stopwatch. From the water, someone else is already reading the current, calculating the angle, watching for the moment the leading boat makes its first mistake.

Regatta watches exist because of this window — the five minutes before the gun, the countdown that every competing boat runs simultaneously, the margin between a good start and a disqualifying one. The real ones, the instrument-grade ones, have countdown bezels and specialized timers built around exactly this scenario. They are used by people who race. What proliferated outside of the sport instead was the look: the primary colors of the buoys and signal flags and Bauhaus color theory, put on watches that would never get closer to a starting line than a café terrace with a view of the water.

Sternglas, which is actually based in Hamburg, spent two years building a chronograph version of their Hamburg model. The ask had been sitting in their community for a while. The original Hamburg was already their best-selling line, a clean Bauhaus-inspired watch with minimal bezel and almost no distance between the crystal and the edge of the case — all dial, short lugs, the result of removing everything unnecessary. Adding a chronograph meant pushers and sub-dials without breaking what already worked. And they pulled it off with style.

The Hamburg Chrono comes in three versions. The Dark Green Bronze pairs a PVD bronze case with a dark green dial and orange chronograph hand. The Regatta goes full primary: red, yellow, and blue in a Bauhaus arrangement, with the added trick of signal flags appearing in the date window on alternating days.

The Silver is the one I keep coming back to, though. White satinised dial, polished stainless steel case, black needle hands with lume, and a red chronograph hand that provides the only real punctuation on an otherwise composed dial. This could easily be described as a pure distillation of a regatta timer. Because when you strip out the primary colors and the racing-flags inspiration, what you’re left is perfectly simple.

There is a red date window at six o'clock to match. The pusher at two o'clock — the one that starts and stops the chronograph — shares that same red, a bit of deliberate visual grammar that explains the function without a word of instruction. This is the Bauhaus principle actually at work rather than just invoked by a marketing team: the form signals the function. The pusher at four o'clock resets the chronograph.

The case is 42mm across and 9.3mm tall, which sounds large until you see it in the flesh and notice that almost all of those 42 millimeters are dial. The bezel is minimal to the point of near-absence, and the 46mm lug-to-lug makes it an almost fully circular presence on wrist. The lugs angle downward steeply and are short enough that the watch sits close. That’s not something you get often from a 42mm watch. It wears more like a 38mm chrono. On the Silver, with a simpler dial and no competing colors, the watch appears almost elegant rather than assertive.

Inside is the Seiko TMI VK64, which is what Sternglas uses across the Chrono line. It is a mecha-quartz, meaning the timekeeping is quartz but the chronograph function is mechanically driven. The seconds hand moves in five steps per second rather than ticking once, which gives it a sweep that quartz chronographs almost never have. At the 9 o'clock position is a 60-minute totalizer; at 3, a 24-hour display that has its defenders and its detractors. Water resistance is 5 ATM, which should be plenty enough for everyday wear. The date window at six is large, framed in red, a detail that is more visible and more attractive in person than it reads on a spec sheet.

The caseback carries an engraving of two sailboats on the Alster. It is not visible when the watch is on the wrist, which is a minor irony given how much of the design references sailing culture. But the engraving is there, and it is detailed, and it connects the watch to a specific place and tradition in a way that feels earned rather than borrowed. Sternglas is a Hamburg brand. The Alster is their water.

The Hamburg Chrono Silver is €349 and is available on the Sternglas website.

Sternglas also has a special offer for It’s About Time readers. If you use the ABOUTTIME10 code at purchase, you’ll get 10% off the entire collection.

-Vuk