Those who have heard of Glashütte may have an impression of this watchmaking Mecca in Germany being a large city. In fact, it is a tiny town of just some 2500 inhabitants, in the eastern hills of the Ore Mountains, close to Dresden, most of whom either work for the three manufactories (making in-house movements), or for companies ancillary to the watch industry.
NOMOS Glashütte, founded in 1990, is one of the three manufactories and is the brand that produces timepieces that are amongst the most beautiful in the world of watchmaking. NOMOS became a manufactory in 2005, an enormous achievement when only around a dozen watch companies in the world make their own in-house movements.
Tangente was the first model to be produced in 1992, followed quickly by Orion, Ludwig and Tetra. Although the basic characteristics of these models remain as they were originally designed they, naturally, all now contain the NOMOS Glashutte in-house manufactured movements
In 2005 the first in-house automatic movement appeared, in the large version of Tangente, called Tangomat. The complete Club series arrived in 2007 and 2008 and in 2009 Zurich made it appearance. Rounded corners, parallel diagonals, massive elegance, all of which sound slightly paradoxical is, in fact, very NOMOS Glashütte. But Zurich abandons, for the first time, the principle of equality, where each models was built for both men and women. Zurich is unashamedly masculine at 41 mm in diameter and manly image.
Just to balance things out, NOMOS Glashütte introduced “Series 33” in 2010. Smaller cases in the all the classic designs are now available for the smaller wrist and at the same time, the classics were given a larger date, in a correspondingly larger case.
In Spring 2011, the brand new WorldTimer and GSM models will be unveiled, following a large scale wearer test in 2010. The prototypes of these models attracted so much attention Salon QP in November 2010, having to wait for the real launch in 2011 is almost unbearable.
Click here to visit the main NOMOS Glashütte web site
