Making Time Sing: A Look at the Chiming Watches Competing at GPHG 2026

I’ve been a member of the GPHG Academy (Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève, a foundation overseen by the City and Canton of Geneva) since its inception in 2020. Held every year, GPHG’s main role is to highlight and reward the most remarkable contemporary creations and promote the watchmaking art worldwide through an academy of jurors from around the globe nominating and deciding which timepieces they consider the best in the world across different categories. It is global, independent of any brand affiliation, and is considered the “Oscars” of watchmaking.

What piques my interest among this year’s nominations is some of the nominated chiming watches. The chiming watches and the minute repeaters of Patek Philippe have received so much attention worldwide and in watchmaking history as well as from the heads of the company, Philippe Stern and Thierry Stern, but there are a lot of different ways to go about creating chiming watches.

There are, of course, alarm watches, such as the recently released Patek Philippe 5322G Chiming Alarm Calatrava, which acts as a relatively modern-looking alarm watch that uses a chime rather than the more mainstream, and frankly less beautiful, buzzing sound.

There are watches that tell time by sound, doing so on demand. The feature is usually triggered by pushing a button or pushing up a flattish sliding actuator that winds a separate barrel dedicated to the chiming mechanism, or occurs automatically, chiming on the hour and/or quarter hour (Grande and Petite Sonneries). These complications were developed at a time where there was no way to see your wristwatch hands at night, so the mechanisms were developed for the watches to talk to you—or sing to you.

There are different ways you can look at what you want out of a chiming watch or a repeater. You can have them as clean and classic as you want, or they can go deeply technical in different ways. To examine this more closely, we can inspect the watches that were nominated for the just-concluded first round voting session in the GPHG in the Mechanical Exception category. They are all relatively simple in what they are trying to accomplish, with each their own look, sound, and charm. It was, frankly, both fun and challenging to go through this process.

Chopard L.U.C. Grand Strike

The Chopard L.U.C. Grand Strike is a minute repeater, a petite sonnerie, and a grande sonnerie in a white gold case. It will tell time on demand, but it’s also a grande sonnerie that chimes on its own every hour and quarter-hour. If it is 3:45, you will hear the chimes for three hours, then you will hear the three-chime sequence for each of the quarters past the hour. This watch also has the petite sonnerie, which will, on its own, strike every hour, as well as the quarter hours (no hour). This watch has a very open, dial-less design exposing the very balanced, complicated, and classic look that is somewhat monochromatic.

Blancpain Grand Double Sonnerie

There’s also the Blancpain Grand Double Sonnerie, which has a bit more delineation of sub-dials and design on the piece as well as a set of somewhat bolder color differences. Blancpain named this watch a double grande sonnerie because you can choose between two different melodies produced by four hammers, which you can observe if you look closely.

Bvlgari Octo Roma Grand Sonnerie

With the Bvlgari Octo Roma Grand Sonnerie, what you see is open work, mostly on the left side of the watch; the right has kind of a stylized grill look, which gives it a more modern look than other chiming watches. It has a four-hammer minute repeater, and is both a grande sonnerie and a petite sonnerie in a case of satin-polished titanium.

Hermès Arceau Samarkand

The Hermès Arceau Samarkand is a three-hammer minute repeater, but with not that much revealed. What is shown comes though an aperture the shape of a horse. The case is gold and has the equestrian-inspired shape of the Arceau family.

Louis Vuitton Escale Minute Repeater and the Angelus Tinkler 1958 Steel

There are also chiming watches that don’t show a lot of the movement on the face, which has its special charm. The two examples we have among this year’s nominees are the Louis Vuitton Escale Minute Repeater and the Angelus Tinkler 1958 Steel, which have two completely different looks.

The gold-cased Louis Vuitton Escale Minute Repeater has a single hand acting as a retrograde for the minutes and a digital display for the hours, with a very stylized handmade guilloché center dial that on its own requires over 60 hours of work.

The Angelus Tinkler 1958 Steel is actually quite refreshing. It looks like a vintage watch, and you can’t even really tell that it is, in fact, a repeater; in this case, it’s a quarter repeater, which means that, on call, it will sing out the hours and the minutes as opposed to a minute repeater, which sounds the hours, quarter-hours, and minutes past that quarter.

All these have their own different appeals, but they’re all at the very highest levels of watchmaking and watchmaking ability—making casting my vote quite challenging, really.

More information on nominated timepieces at the GPHG website.