Every half hour and hour, a home in Colorado Springs comes to life.

Gongs and chimes ring out, melodies from once upon a time. Dozens of old clocks sing their old songs — wooden grandfathers standing tall, German cuckoos hanging on walls. Those little birds spring through little doors. Little dancers twirl among other fantastical characters alive in their ornate, fantastical boxes.

“I find it very therapeutic,” Todd Nipp says. “Very calming.”

This is Nipp’s home, though it appears to be a hobbit’s home. The fireplace crackles amid the ticking and tocking of his 60-plus clocks, some of them more than 100 years old. Other antiques are around, wooden furniture and rare books between festive, fall decor.

Yes, you might expect to find a hobbit here — or a man practicing an art of the Old World.

That’s Nipp, whose office is down the hall lined with black-and-white photographs. Drawers keep various springs and gears, clips and screws, hooks and nails, ornamental hands for telling the hour and minute for some clock that has forgotten how.

One desk keeps Nipp’s tools under anchored magnifying glasses: micro screwdrivers, micro pliers, “micro everything,” Nipp says with a grin. “You can’t be shaky.”

And then there’s his current project: a box-shaped clock back on its cast iron legs, returning to life.

The customer called from Arizona, Nipp says. “He called me and said, ‘There’s no way I can get rid of this clock. It’s been in my mom’s family for two generations; she used to wind it as a child every Sunday morning. Can you restore it?’”

That’s what Nipp does best.

“Everybody either has one or remembers their grandparents having one, and it’s in the box in the attic,” he says. “They’ll bring me a box with an old cuckoo clock covered with 20 years of dust.”

Nipp goes by the Clock Doctor on his Facebook page, where customers tend to find him. Or they find his Etsy page, where he lists for sale some of the antique clocks he collects and restores. Those are the ones he can bring himself to sell.

It’s a struggle to let go of others — the common struggle of the horologist, the clock craftsman and student of time.

There is something oddly intimate about these old clocks, about the painstaking, sure-handed, micro process behind their revival.

Nipp looks at this current project now, this generational timekeeper that came to him in dusty, rusted pieces. “I’ll be sad to send it back,” he says.

Nipp is somewhat new to this niche world; just this fall he received his certificate of horology from Denver’s Emily Griffith Technical College. It was the culmination of an education that started a few years ago with the repair of his grandparents’ cuckoo clock from the 1970s.

Nipp is somewhat new, while one he admires, Mike Korn, descends from two generations of Denver horologists. Korn knows the odd intimacy well.

“Sometimes you open the back of the clock and you stick your nose in there, and it has this aroma to it,” he says. “Sometimes you see a spider that died in its web.”

You find other things. Not long ago, at his Keenesburg antique shop called A Step Back in Time, Ken Gfeller took a close look inside an old grandfather clock.

“I got the light just right, and I was able to find where different clockmakers had written in pencil when they worked on it,” he says. “I think maybe 1844 was the oldest signature I could find. And then it went up through 1977, and then us.”

Gfeller was Nipp’s instructor at Emily Griffith. Nipp thought the man was someone else — “big white beard, saggy droopy eyes. His voice is super smooth and calming,” Nipp says. “I was joking with my wife, Santa Claus is my instructor.”

At 53, Nipp’s classmates appeared much older than him as well. There aren’t many more than a dozen at a time, Gfeller says, and indeed there aren’t many youngsters.

“They didn’t seem to have the patience for this,” recalls Korn, the instructor before Gfeller. Students tended to be engineer types, he says, and “usually guys about ready to retire or retired.”

That’s the demographic of the occasional, small workshops and gatherings Korn oversees as president of Denver’s chapter of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors. The association counts about 10,000 members worldwide, according to its website, which also speaks to the vitality of the interest, however obscure:

“Timekeepers began keeping everyone and everything on schedule, from farmers to pharmacists, from sailing ships to space shuttles. Today, almost nothing is coordinated without using a timepiece.”

The website adds: “Horology offers an impressive record of engineering genius.”

The record spans time and space, stretching as far back to the days our eyes first watched the sun and moon move across the sky. The National Institute of Standards and Technology traces the record to ancient Egypt.

As early as 3500 B.C., massive obelisks were erected to cast shadows under the sun — early sundials. The national institute also credits the Egyptians for an early timekeeper “that didn’t depend on the observation of celestial bodies:” The pharaoh Amenhotep I was buried with a contraption that tracked time by the steady dripping of water.

Ancient Greeks called such contraptions clepsydra, “water thieves.” Millenia gave way to other time-measuring concepts depending on controlled, repetitive phenomena; Galileo is credited as the first to conceive the pendulum. This was ahead of a Dutch scientist, Christiaan Huygens, developing a balance wheel and spring assembly around 1675 — a concept that prevails in some wristwatches still today.

There were other advances along the way, most notably the “main spring” concept of Peter Henlein. The German inventor died long before cuckoo clocks rose out of his country’s Black Forest through the 1700s. William Clement claimed another key concept, “anchor and recoil.” His London home would go on to make famous the grandfather clock.

Europeans continued to advance concepts toward timekeeping’s atomic and digital ages. And here we are now, deep in this age of timekeeping by phones, car dashboards and kitchen appliances — further and further from generations that cherished those ornate, hand-carved grandfather clocks and cuckoos on the wall.

The clocks were necessary and artful before they were just artful.

“The market right now is pretty much gone,” Gfeller says from his antique shop. “The current trend is smartwatches and all of that stuff.”

Stuff from Walmart, Nipp says. “Designed to be thrown away.”

The future of horology? “I kind of think it’s a bleak future,” Korn says. “Just because the ages of the people that are getting into it.”

But every now and then someone on the younger side comes along. Someone like Nipp.

He was someone who wanted his grandparents’ cuckoo clock repaired, someone who was told it would be cheaper to buy a similar antique rather than pay for the repair. “That’s not what nostalgia is about,” Nipp says.

Nostalgia is about a certain thing, a certain time and place, a certain loved one, a certain chime.

In Nipp’s home, the clocks chime and the birds cuckoo, and he is filled with the kind of comfort that nostalgia provides. And he is filled with wonder.

“I look at that clock, and I wonder how many homes that was in. Who looked at it? Who was excited about the time when they were looking at it, and who was maybe having a bad day and not excited about it when they were looking at it? There’s so much history and emotion in a clock.”

Maybe the future of horology depends on that appreciation. Or maybe, simply, a memory.

Nipp thinks back to a customer now.

“I had one lady totally break down in my shop,” he says. “She started crying when her clock started cuckooing again, because she just remembered it as a child.”