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 of design, insists, everything here refers back to how the watches are made. So you really have to start in Glashütte, 230km south of Berlin. It’s here that the making happens and where the soul of the brand is found.
A one-industry town, Glashütte is celebrating 175 years of watchmaking. Nomos Glashütte, 30 years old, is in storied company. Glance out of its offices in the old railway station and see A Lange & Söhne and Glashütte Original across the road, while Moritz Grossmann’s atelier is up the hill. The town’s first wave of watchmakers was part of a government attempt to relieve poverty after the failure of the local silver mines. Nomos Glashütte was founded in 1990 by Roland Schwertner as 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 experience of watchmaking (save for childhood visits to family in the town).
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