If you go back through everything we’ve said about round wall clocks over the years, there’s a pretty clear line where opinion turns. Early on the whole team was firmly anti, the general feeling being that a big plain circle on a wall is what you buy when you’ve given up trying, the interior design equivalent of a shrug. Somewhere in the last couple of years that flipped, and now half the office has one, which is either growth or we’ve all just gotten lazier at the same rate.
This particular clock nearly didn’t make it past the first week. It arrived slightly too big for the wall we’d measured for, because someone measured the wall and someone else measured the box, and those two people did not compare notes. Thirty four centimeters looks reasonable on a tape measure and considerably less reasonable sitting above a narrow console table making the whole hallway look like it’s wearing a hat one size too large. There was a genuine plan to repackage it and send it back that Sunday.
It’s still there. Nobody quite remembers who talked everyone out of the return, only that by Monday it had become “the hallway clock” and things that get a name tend to stay.
What kept it, honestly, wasn’t the size settling in, it was the finish. It’s a brushed metal frame, and we were braced for the usual fingerprint disaster that brushed metal always seems to invite, except this one has taken four months of a toddler’s hands and a dog’s tail and still looks properly brushed rather than smeared.
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That’s the whole review of the material, really, it doesn’t fight you, it just sits there quietly doing its job, which after some of the clocks this team has bought is genuinely something to write home about.
The numbers are printed thin, almost too thin, and from certain angles at certain times of day they disappear a bit, which one of us finds elegant and the rest of us find mildly infuriating when you’re trying to check the time while holding a coffee and a coat and a child’s shoe. The second hand ticks with an audible click that nobody noticed in the shop and everybody noticed at eleven that first night lying in the room next door, which is a lesson we apparently have to relearn with every single clock we’ve ever bought.
So the verdict, such as it is, sits somewhere between the two eras of this team’s opinion on round clocks. Not the shrug of a decision it once was, not quite the thing we’d call properly good either. It’s a bit too big, it ticks a bit too loud, the finish has quietly outperformed every expectation we had for it, and it’s still on the wall, which by our own track record counts as a genuine result.
