Traditional Swiss watchmaking meets 21st-century German design.

Tucked into a rolling, pine-clad mountainscape, it comes as no surprise that the chocolate-box-pretty village of Glashütte is a hive of traditional watchmaking. Snowy roofs, ornate steeples and narrow cobbled streets. It’s much like any other village in the Watch Valley of Switzerland’s Jura mountains.

Only, this isn’t Switzerland. It’s Germany. Or to be precise, Saxony, 15 miles south of Dresden.

The tiny toytown of Glashütte (population 7,000) feels so idyllically Swiss, it is unsurprising that Swiss watchmaking’s two biggest players, the Richemont Group and Swatch Group, have established two of their most prestigious brands here – the revived and revered local names A. Lange & Söhne and Glashütte Original.

Glashütte has been the ticking heart of Germany’s watchmaking industry for almost 170 years, but it’s not all about nostalgia. Over the road from A. Lange & Söhne and Glashütte Original, occupying the town’s old railway station, is NOMOS Glashütte, a watch company that is just 28 years old, but arguably the first to kickstart the town’s thriving, modern era of watchmaking since the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Plucking eager-to-learn young watchmakers from the GDR-era “people’s” watchmaker, tens of millions of euros were then invested in machines over the next few decades, to the point where, by 2005, NOMOS was making its own movements from the raw metal, rather than buying in from Switzerland. By 2014, NOMOS had even mastered manufacture of the notoriously tricksy, tick-tick-ticking Swiss lever escapement mechanism. Dubbed the Swing System, its tiny anchor-shaped lever, jagged escape wheel and oscillating balance wheel were seven years and €13m in the making, a relatively small price to pay for total autonomy, total made-in-Germany status and total respect from horology’s finest.

Which brings us to NOMOS’ latest technological sensation: neomatik. The lower case is deliberate, presumably to reflect how extraordinarily flat this family of self-winding watches is. What they all have in common is the in-house-made DUW 3001 mechanical calibre (DUW rather prosaically standing for Deutsche Uhrenfabrik, or German watch factory). A wafer-thin 3.2mm in height, including the swinging winding rotor mounted on top, yet highly precise and energy efficient, the neomatik watches achieve a horological combination that until now was either impossible or cost a fortune.

There’s now a DUW 6101 variant, with an integrated date function that ups things to 3.6mm, but it is still just as slick and sleekly polished, with all the hand-applied signature stripes, perlage and blued screws that demarcate Glashütte’s movements as some of the world’s finest.

But as predictably perfect as every neomatik is inside – see for yourself through the crystal caseback – what’s startling is how varied this family has already become in terms of design.

Unlike its more technically minded next-door neighbours, NOMOS is particularly clever when it comes to design. Mountain-dwelling watchmakers tend not to be the most metropolitan, aesthetically driven of sorts, so CEO Mr Uwe Ahrendt keeps things fresh with the creative kids of east Berlin, where NOMOS has its own dedicated studio. The result is a clean-cut, multi-award-winning Bauhaus style, with an infectious sense of fun.

The At Work prefix of the new Metro neomatik 39 might seem to preclude any impending fun, but the gorgeous midnight-blue dial and its neon-orange pop of a seconds hand speaks to a cosmopolitan creative. Metro might have started out as a one-off collaboration with one of Berlin’s rising stars in furniture design, Mr Mark Braun, but it’s now a flourishing range that proved NOMOS could flirt with its Bauhaus design codes.

And what about this year’s Autobahn launch? A vast luminescent semi-circle alludes to the joys of night-time driving, painted over a dial contoured like a miniature skatepark, all in proud defiance of NOMOS’ sober, monochrome origins. Autobahn’s four years in gestation at the hands of star designer Mr Werner Aisslinger have paid off, and what else could tick away inside but NOMOS’ star DUW 6101 neomatik mechanics?

It is amazing to think watches as contrasting as the Autobahn and the Orion neomatik 41 date have identical things going on beneath the bonnet. But this simply proves the versatility afforded by those slimline DUW mechanics. More traditional in design, still neomatik through and through, unmistakably NOMOS Glashütte.