When it comes to watch complications, few are more ubiquitous than the chronograph. The feature, which incorporates a start and stop function to measure elapsed time, is a favorite among watchmakers, who are constantly revisiting it, adding aesthetic details and mechanical flourishes.

William Rohr, founder of the independent brand Massena LAB and best known in the watch world by his pseudonym, William Massena, said the chronograph’s price range and its playfulness account for both its popularity and pervasiveness.

“You can start buying Swiss mechanical chronographs in the $2,000 range,” Mr. Massena said by phone from the Scottish Highlands, where he was staying with family. “And they can go up to $200,000, if not $2 million.

“The fact that you can interact with the watch is what makes them so appealing to people,” he added. “It really makes the watch a toy.”

And yet, until 1999, when A. Lange & Söhne introduced its Datograph — considered groundbreaking because it featured a complex integrated movement, a sharp contrast to the off-the-shelf modular construction that defined the way so many other models of the post-quartz era were built — classic in-house chronograph movements were a rarity. Most brands sourced their chronograph calibers from specialists, such as Lemania, a Swiss movement manufacturer acquired by Breguet in 1992. (Seven years later, both companies were absorbed by the Swatch Group.)

“The Datograph was mind boggling,” Mr. Massena said. “It kind of started the race for the chronograph. People realized it was not just about having extra buttons on the watch, it was about the beauty of the movement. It’s a whole little world inside the watch.”

To highlight the design elements that can make mechanical chronographs look so different, The New York Times spoke to the designers of two recently introduced in-house models, the Tentagraph by the Japanese watchmaker Grand Seiko and the 1941 Grönograaf by the independent Dutch brand Grönefeld. The former retails for $13,700; the latter starts at $165,000.

“It’s like a Lexus versus a Lamborghini,” Mr. Massena said.

Tentagraph by Grand Seiko

Since its founding in 1960, Grand Seiko has prided itself on its devotion to the practical concerns of watchmaking: Is the dial legible? Does the watch tell time accurately? Is it robust?

While these values are still core to the brand, over the past 18 years — and especially since 2019, when the watchmaker introduced its brand philosophy, “The Nature of Time,” an ode to the importance that the Japanese culture places on seasonality and time — Grand Seiko has made it a practice to create dials that reflect its natural environment.

“For a very long time, our communication was focused on the technological superiority of our brand,” Akio Naito, president of Seiko Watch Corporation, said in an interview last month at Seiko House Ginza in Tokyo. (Seiko, the value-priced, volume-driven Japanese watchmaker that traces its roots to 1881, created Grand Seiko in 1960 to produce its most luxurious product. In 2017, the marque was spun off, becoming its own independent brand.)

“But as we started competing against the top Swiss luxury brands, who had already started emphasizing the heritage and craftsmanship as opposed to pure functionality,” Mr. Naito added, “we came up with this idea of ‘The Nature of Time,’ which captures the DNA of our brand from two different angles: craftsmanship and our beautiful surroundings.”

Few timepieces embody that dual mandate better than the Tentagraph, Grand Seiko’s first mechanical chronograph, powered by the Caliber 9SC5. Introduced at the Watches and Wonders Geneva trade fair in March, the model was the product of a yearslong effort to develop a chronograph with a 72-hour power reserve and a high-beat movement, which ticks 10 times a second as opposed to the standard six- or eight-tick calibers, producing more accurate time keeping.

The acrostic poem built into the model’s name reflects these attributes: Ten-t-a-graph is a combination of ten, for 10 beats; the letter t, for three days of power reserve; and the letter a and the suffix -graph because it is an automatic chronograph.

The Dial

With its ceramic bezel complete with tachymeter scale and three subdials, or registers, arranged in the familiar triangular configuration used by most chronographs, the Tentagraph looks like a traditional model.

Upon closer inspection, however, the deep blue face reveals the brand’s signature Mt. Iwate pattern, which looks like a series of craggy mountains and is designed to evoke the 6,686-foot peak visible from Studio Shizukuishi, the Grand Seiko watchmaking atelier in Iwate prefecture, where all of its mechanical timepieces are produced. The hue is meant to recall the night sky above the mountain.

“I thought it would be beautiful if the dial reflected the surface of Mt. Iwate,” said Junichi Kamata, Grand Seiko’s design manager, in an interview at Seiko House Ginza.

Mr. Kamata said that as a college student in southern Honshu, Japan’s main island, in the 1990s, he would pass Mt. Iwate on the way to his hometown Aomori, in the north of the island, twice a year. Immortalizing the mountain in his timepieces, he said, was “such an honor.”

Case and Crystal

“We designed this watch with consideration for how to make a thick movement look thin,” Mr. Kamata said.

The watch crystal was made of box glass, the industry term for synthetic sapphire crystal shaped to rise above the bezel, rather than the more common curved crystal. While Grand Seiko declined to share the exact measurements of the timepiece’s elements, team members said the crystal’s shape and height, and the small space left for the hands between the crystal and the dial, allowed the dial to be placed higher on the timepiece — and closer to the wearer’s eyes — than is common, improving its legibility. They also designed the black zirconia ceramic bezel to look thinner than the usual chronograph bezel.

The 43.2-millimeter titanium case, designed to sit low on the wrist, features hairline finished surfaces alternating with strips of Grand Seiko’s trademark zaratsu polish, an exacting process designed to create a distortion-free, mirror-like finish.

The Design Details

In 2020, with the introduction of Grand Seiko’s Evolution 9 design standard — an update to the design principles established in 1967 for its seminal 44GS model — the brand ushered in a host of small but meaningful revisions to its sport watches. The design changes were all meant, the brand said, to enhance the watches’ beauty, legibility and ease of use.

Take the lugs of the Tentagraph. From the reverse, they have a 3-D shape meant to improve the bracelet’s fit, while the crown features knurled grooves to improve the user’s grip on the small element.

The wide faceted indexes were meant to optimize legibility. And while the typeface used for the tachymeter scale is a custom design, Mr. Kamata said the Tentagraph name on the dial is rendered in Helvetica, an easy-to-read sans-serif typeface designed in 1957 in Switzerland.

“With a high-beat movement, it’s not just technology,” he said. “It’s also how all the small details add up to high legibility. The mixture is so Grand Seiko.”

1941 Grönograaf by Grönefeld

When the brothers Bart and Tim Grönefeld founded their brand in 2008, they knew they wanted to make a chronograph. But it took until last year to bring their first, the 1941 Grönograaf, to fruition.

“We were always looking to do something special with the mechanism,” Bart Grönefeld said on a phone call from their workshop in Oldenzaal, the Netherlands.

There were financial hurdles as well, he said: “We needed to have a lot of confidence that we could sell enough, because the development of the piece is so costly and time-consuming.”

The success of the Grönefeld 1941 Remontoire, introduced in 2016, provided that certainty. “The Remontoire was limited to 188 pieces, and there were 300 more people who wanted it,” Mr. Grönefeld said. “We had quite a long list of potential customers.”

Grönefeld unveiled a prototype of the Grönograaf at the Watches and Wonders Geneva trade fair in March last year and officially introduced the model online four months later, in July. A $175,000 limited edition of 25 pieces in tantalum sold out within a few hours, the brand said, while a $165,000 edition of 188 pieces in steel garnered so much interest that the brothers had to pause orders until they could determine when they would be able to deliver the timepieces. (To add fuel to the fire, the model won the chronograph category at the annual Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève awards event in November 2022.)

“We got so many orders, I didn’t know how to feel,” Mr. Grönefeld said. “Maybe like rock stars feel when they sell out a concert in a few minutes.”

The Case

The case of the Grönograaf is almost identical to that of another model of theirs, the 1941 Remontoire. (Their father, Sjef, was born that year.)

To produce the Remontoire case, the Grönefelds, who never studied design and do not know how to make 3-D drawings on a computer, hired a design team in London that did not specialize in watches. “I wished I was sitting next to them,” Mr. Grönefeld said, “they designed all these things that I had to correct two days later.”

Despite the onerous process, the 39.5-millimeter round case met with so much success that the brothers used it for their next two models: the 1941 Principia and the Decennium Tourbillon.

For the Grönograaf, they increased the case’s size to 40 millimeters, but maintained the same design standards — a combination of concave and convex shapes, sculpted lugs and a conical crown rather than the more common cylindrical shape. “Usually, mass-produced cases are stamped, or milled with normal cutters in CNC [computer numerical control] machines, but our case is completely sculpted by a spherical ball cutter,” Mr. Grönefeld said. “It’s a very long process.” (It takes as long as two weeks to make one case in tantalum, Mr. Grönefeld said, as opposed to one or two days for a case in other metals.)

Materials

Using tantalum — a hard, blue-gray metal not often seen in watchmaking — presented its own machining challenges, but Mr. Grönefeld insisted that it would be right for the limited edition.

“It has a special color and a heavy weight and melts at about 3,000 degrees [Celsius], so it will never melt on your wrist,” he said with a chuckle. (The temperature would be about 5,430 degrees Fahrenheit.) “We wanted to do tantalum many years ago, but our case maker said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’ But for this chronograph, we told him he had to do it. We gave him a lot of wine, and he agreed.”

The Dial

Subdials are a standard feature of chronographs, but the dial of the Grönefeld model — made of stainless steel with an understated matte gray finish — includes an asymmetrical layout along with a centrifugal governor with two domed solid-gold weights, positioned at 4 o’clock.

Typically seen on minute repeaters, the feature slows down the chronograph reset function, “thereby proving kinder to components while delivering a fascinating spectacle in the process,” according to the Grönefeld website.

As the watch blog Quill & Pad has noted, when the long central second hand on most chronographs is reset to zero, it is “like a crash test car hitting the wall. It’s a brutal stop from a relatively high speed. The long hand reverberates back and forth as it swings to a stop, causing stress and wear of the components.”

The governor on the Grönograaf, however, slows that process, all but eliminating the shock on the other chronograph components.

“We decided to give it a place on the dial so the customer will see something coming into action when he pushes the return to zero button,” Mr. Grönefeld said. “I call it ‘mechanical theater.’”