Nomos Glashütte’s newbuilding in Schlottwitz,
just outside its main basein Glashütte, is designed
to blend in with its
surroundings. The facility
centralises production ofalmost all components forthe brand’s 13 movements,and enhances its integrated
approach to watchmaking

UNITED FRONTDiscreet and efficient, Nomos Glashütte’s new production facility reflects its founding values
PHOTOGRAPHY:MAX CREASY

WRITER:JAMES GURNEY

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Talking about Nomos Glashütte, it’s
tempting to start with the watch company’s
design office, Berlinerblau, in Berlin’s
Kreuzberg district. Located in a former
button factory built in the early 1900s,
the studio is all it should be: light flooding
onto whitewashed walls covered in colour
swatches, design details and mood boards,
with Frank Gehry ‘Cloud’ lamps up above.

But, as Michael Paul, the company’s head ofdesign, insists, everything here refers backto how the watches are made. So you reallyhave to start in Glashütte, 230km southof Berlin. It’s here that the making happens
and where the soul of the brand is found.
A one-industry town, Glashütte iscelebrating 175 years of watchmaking.
Nomos Glashütte, 30 years old, is in storiedcompany. Glance out of its offices in theold railway station and see A Lange & Söhneand Glashütte Original across the road,while Moritz Grossmann’s atelier is up thehill. The town’s first wave of watchmakers
was part of a government attempt torelieve poverty after the failure of the local
silver mines. Nomos Glashütte was founded
in 1990 by Roland Schwertner as »GERMANY / WATCHES

93WPR20APR106.pgs 25.02.2020 15:07

Left, the brand’s main
office in Glashütte’s old
railway station
Below, Tangente Neomatik
41 Update, £3,200, in whiteand ruthenium dial versions
with Nomos Glashütte’s
DUW6101 self-winding
movement. The movement

state-owned industries unravelled following
the collapse of East Germany. It was a bold
move for an IT expert and photographer
from Düsseldorf with no prior experienceof watchmaking (save for childhood visits tofamily in the town).
Nomos Glashütte has since grown tobecome the town’s largest maker by volume,
producing 20,000 watches a year. It has
gained a strong following in the US, andwon design and product awards including
the Grand Prix d’Horlogerie de Genève.
The brand is built around an industrial
design philosophy that traces its roots
back, via the Bauhaus, to the Deutscher
Werkbund movement of the early 20thcentury, modelled in turn on the British
Arts & Crafts movement. The Deutscher

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Werkbund is still active and Nomos
Glashütte joined in 1992, recognising sharedvalues of honesty, quality, affordability anddesign that is detached from fashion. As thebrand’s own tome, Nomos Glashütte - TheGreat Universal Encyclopaedia, puts it ‘theWerkbund aims to promote designers anduse modern technology to create productsthat are both beautiful and affordable’.
The movement also emphasises theinterplay between art, industry and craft
and the equality of value each should have.
In practice, you can see this in both thedetails of Nomos Glashütte watches and theway they are made. ‘We work together ateye level,’ as a production manager puts it.
Recent growth has seen the brand’scomponent production centralised in a newshows the winding rotor,‘three-quarter’ plateand Nomos Glashütte’s‘swing system’ balanceand escapement
Below left, prototype
dials at the Berlin design
studio show a distinctive
approach to colour

facility just up the road from Glashütte in
Schlottwitz. The timber-clad exterior blendswith the forested valley. Inside, the facility
has everything needed to produce thewhole suite of components that go into thebrand’s 13 movements, save for the jewelbearings and balance springs, which aresourced externally (electro-plating also
happens off-site, to avoid contamination ofa nearby river). The staff can quickly reactto feedback from the watchmakers backin Glashütte, a real advantage when working
at tolerances measured in fractions of amillimetre. But the building also works as
an expression of the Deutscher Werkbund
approach: state-of-the-art, multi-axis
cutting machines sit next to equipment fromthe 1950s; finishing is by hand, but quality
control uses the latest optical gear; every
last filing is recycled and the climate control
employs heat exchangers.
The brand’s movements are designed to
get the best out of the production system;
escapement components (the wheel,balance spring, pallets and anchors at
the heart of a watch) are made in minutely
different sizes, so a balanced assembly
can be made from parts at hand, rather
than through adjusting each part to fit.
Back at the Berlinerblau, Paulemphasises the equality of production withdesign: ‘Design and mechanics have to beconsidered together.’ He says the Nomos
Glashütte approach is to make watches fordaily life, and in terms of design inspiration,‘it’s not a question of looking for details
to use, but of sensing the mood, what’s in
the air. This is why the design office is in
Berlin rather than Glashütte.’ That said, thewatches still follow many design traditionsof the brand’s hometown, such as thethree-quarter mainplate and blued hands.
‘It is where we are from, our origins, andwe must respect that,’ says Paul. ∂nomos-glashuette.com

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