When Rory Corr was a student at the Glasgow School of Art, he was particularly interested in the work of Max Bill, a Swiss architect, artist and industrial designer known for his understated, utilitarian aesthetic.
“It’s very honest,” Mr. Corr, now 39, said of Mr. Bill’s style, speaking by phone from his home office in Glasgow, where he now works as an architect and teaches part time at his alma mater. “It’s quite raw in parts. It’s not showy — it’s very matter of fact. It’s quite functional; It’s very modest.”
After graduating in 2011, Mr. Corr moved to London. He did not own a watch at the time, but he found himself drawn to one on an acquaintance’s wrist: a clean 40-millimeter steel timepiece with two chronoscope subdials and a date display. The watch was derived from the sleek timepieces Mr. Bill designed more than 60 years ago for the German watch brand Junghans.
“There’s just enough information but no more,” Mr. Corr said of the timepiece. “There’s just enough metal but no more; the curve of the dial is just beautiful. It’s formally just a beautiful object.”
In June 2012, Mr. Corr started dating Amy Wilson, now 37, a jewelry brand consultant who had moved to London from her native Glasgow. As they got to know each other, he told her about the Junghans Max Bill Chronoscope that he could not stop thinking about.
“In those early days,” he said, “when we were figuring out what films we liked, what music we liked, what clothes we liked, what designers we liked, this would have come up as quite an important thing for me to mention.”
The relationship grew serious, and in spring 2013, the couple moved into an apartment in the Hackney neighborhood of London. Around the same time, at Liberty, the Regent Street department store, Mr. Corr spotted what became his dream Max Bill watch — with a black dial rather than the white one he had initially seen.
Ms. Wilson decided that, when the time was right, the watch would be an ideal gift. In mid-2016, she spent a couple of months with her family in Glasgow as her older brother, Sean, was ill. During that challenging period, she recalled, “I would escape mentally by fantasizing about giving Rory this watch and proposing. It would just take me away. And I did it so much that I was like, ‘I’m getting my credit card and buying the watch. I’m just going to do it.’”
That August, she bought the watch for 1,170 pounds (about $1,555 at the time) from the online retailer Chronext and then surprised Mr. Corr with plane tickets for a weekend in Prague in early September, just before his 30th birthday.
She had planned to propose during dinner, but inspired by the view from a rooftop bar where they stopped first, Ms. Wilson decided to propose then and there.
“I was speechless,” Mr. Corr said. “We both cried as soon as it happened.”
Before they left the bar, Mr. Corr revealed that he had planned to propose, too, but during a trip to California the next month. He had ordered a custom ring from Mayo Nomura, a jewelry designer: It is a 9-karat gold band with a diamond and a bezel-set blue sapphire, the couple’s shared birthstone. (At the time, Ms. Nomura worked at the London jeweler Alex Monroe, where Ms. Wilson was brand manager and now is a consultant.) The couple married on Aug. 24, 2018.
Ever since the proposal, Mr. Corr said, he has worn his watch “everywhere: building sites, climbing scaffolding, going on nights out, all of that.
“It’s hardly ever been off my wrist in nearly 10 years, which I think is the right approach.”
The post This Proposal Came Right on Time, and With a Watch appeared first on New York Times.
