HAUTLENCE refines the unusual design of its latest line of jumping-hour models
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The eagerly anticipated second effort from HAUTLENCE did not disappoint this spring in Basel. With HLS, the brand has refined the concept displayed to much fanfare in 2005's HL line, offering eight new pieces whose finishing and attention to detail reveal a young brand that is growing up fast.
Readers of International Watch learned about the brand in May, 2005, in the first U.S. report on HAUTLENCE, which we wrote about again in October of 2006. At first sight we were impressed with the unusual tie-rod mechanism, the HL manual-wind calibre with over 150 components, and the display that employed that mechanism as its centrepiece.
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What's new?
The movement powering HLS is the same manual-wind calibre as the brand's debut collection, and the display concept remains largely unchanged. What we have in HLS is still a regulator display with jumping hours, retrograde minutes, and small seconds. The main esthetical changed that will jump out to anyone who has seen the HL are the way the hours and seconds are presented, and also the fortified, sporty character lent by the larger bezel with visible screws.
In the HL, the hours are displayed via a disk with an aperture that jumps to reveal a new hour on the stationary disk beneath, leaving the eleven other hours occluded. The HLS adopts a more conventional jumping-hour configuration: the very prominent aperture remains stationary, beneath which the hour disk makes its jumping rounds. In the case of the seconds, a similar change has been made, though in reverse. The HL displays the seconds with a sweeping hand, located in the lower right-hand corner of the dial.
In the HLS, the seconds are found in the same place, but now a seconds disk rotates below a stationary seconds marker. This latter modification allows HAUTLENCE'S design team to show off more of the tie-rod mechanism that drives the jumping hour: the rod now sits atop the upper portion of the seconds disk.
Eight versions of the HLS are available, in a variety of executions, each edition limited to eighty-eight pieces. Whereas HL was available in gray, rose or yellow gold, every model in the HLS collection has a titanium base. The bezels and lugs of most of the pieces are still made in these familiar gold variations, although there are two versions with a sandblasted DLC treatment.
By Jonathan Bues - INTERNATIONAL WATCH MAGAZINE October 2007
