The lettering above the door, in serifed metal lettering about seven inches high, reads Institut Minerva De Recherche En Haute Horlogerie: the Minerva Institute for High-End Watchmaking Research. Were it not for the three twenty-foot flagpoles a short distance away, two of which bear black ‘Montblanc’ pennants (the third is a Swiss cross), you might be forgiven for mistaking this beige building for some kind of illustrious academic college.

In a way, maybe it is. Located in Villeret, in the Swiss Jura mountains, the five-storey building – and the two near-symmetrical three-storey wings each side – is a research library of sorts. Inside its walls lies a wealth of historical archive material along with practical laboratories equipped with a combination of traditional and cutting-edge machinery, prototyping facilities and areas dedicated to intense study. Engineering, materials science, art, design, and even sculpture are all represented.

All of which isn’t exactly what you’d expect from the watchmaking division of a major international luxury brand – itself part of one of the largest luxury conglomerates on the planet. But this particular building isn’t the whole story when it comes to Montblanc’s watchmaking operation.

Other watches produced in Villeret are also flying the flag for Montblanc’s literary and historical connections – a concept that was, until recently, reserved for the pens. Now, we have the Star Legacy Exo Tourbillon Skeleton Enheduanna, a ten-piece limited edition watch which pays tribute to a woman thought to be the earliest known author, writing in Sumeria more than four thousand years ago. Montblanc was able to find a professor of ancient linguistics specialising in Sumerian, in Geneva, to accurately translate and recreate sections of text; it did not have to look quite as far to find watchmakers and finishing craftspeople to build and decorate the watch. On the day of my visit, one of the ten pieces was being cased-up for the final time; each watch is worked on by a single watchmaker, and having purchased one, customers are invited to come to Villeret to meet the man or woman responsible for their treasured possession. It happens a lot, says Lecamp, and provides the brand with ample opportunities to reinforce the connections between the physical geography of the region and the watches, as well as the centuries-old legacy of craft that has been nurtured in its valleys. 

“You see those hills?” he says, pointing from the fifth floor across the valley towards a tree-lined V-shaped cleft. “We take them up there, for a hike, and eat fondue. You can see the Mont Blanc massif from there.” As it turns out, that V-shaped valley is also rumoured to be the source of inspiration for Minerva’s distinctive chronograph bridge – exactly the kind of poetic licence we have come to expect from watchmaking at Montblanc.

Some 20 miles away in Le Locle, you’ll also find another building belonging to the brand. Looking like something out of a fairytale, the villa – perched incongruously atop a glass-clad modern workshop and surrounded by manicured lawns – houses most of Montblanc’s corporate functions, and is also responsible for the production of its entry- and mid-level watches. (Broadly, those that use either third-party movements from suppliers like Sellita, or calibres created by Val Fleurier, the central production hub for components and entire movements that serves much of the entire Richemont group). Le Locle is also home to Montblanc’s quality control procedures – a 500-hour testing programme that every single watch must pass – and it is where you’d go if you wanted to witness, for example, its breakaway all-time bestseller, the Iced Sea diving watch, coming into being. 

In fact, the vast majority of the watches produced – about 99.6 per cent, if outside analysts’ figures are correct – will never pass through Villeret. They won’t be painstakingly assembled, then disassembled, then reassembled again by the white-coated master watchmakers and technicians in the Institut’s workshops. Their bridges and levers won’t be treated to the highest levels of hand-finishing, and their escapements won’t beat to the hand-tuned frequency of a hairspring created in the very same building. 

But the 300-or-so watches that will be made there are something quite special indeed. 

Officially, there is no distinction: all Montblanc watches bear the same imprimatur whether they are a 40mm Tradition Automatic Date (retail price £2,035) or a six-figure hand-engraved ExoTourbillon decorated in homage to Jules Verne’s classic adventure novel Around The World In Eighty Days. But connoisseurs know the difference, and it all comes back to that name: Minerva. 

One recent Montblanc milestone came about in much this way. In 2021, the team got to work on freshly-installed Managing Director Laurent Lecamp’s suggestion that they invert the chronograph movement for which Minerva is arguably best-known: the calibre MB 16.29. The result of this work is the recently launched Unveiled Secret monopusher chronograph. It’s a remarkable watch, the first to present the sinuous hand-finished levers and cams of a hand-wound haute horlogerie chronograph directly beneath the openworked dial. Contrary to common myth, Minerva’s signature flourish – the arrow-tipped lever arcing here across the upper half of the dial – isn’t a devil’s tail, but a nod to the spear carried by the Roman goddess Minerva. Hand-bevelled like the rest of the lever, it is the single easiest way to identify a Minerva movement at a glance. 

Reversing the movement was no small task, requiring 21 additional components and the substantial rearrangement of the chronograph works. After all, if you compare the new watch with the case back view of a classic Montblanc/Minerva chronograph, you will see the changes are more than a mirror-view inversion. According to the team, this was partly necessary, partly aesthetic – a key consideration when you consider that the Minerva-based chronographs are frequently hailed by collectors for their beauty. 

A certain sense of elan, a fondness for flair and flourishes is par for the course at Minerva. Historically, it made movements that were not just functional but visually thrilling: both in their hand-finishing, as you would expect, but also in their overall proportions and layout. Today, this ethos is expressed in details such as the twisted tourbillon bridge on its ExoTourbillon models, which take three weeks to assemble, and the outrageous ambition of the Metamorphosis complications, which remain the high-water mark of horological achievement at Montblanc. 

It's not just brand’s showstoppers that embody this attitude. Even the Minerva logo, with a gracefully cursive swoosh to its M, speaks to a certain flamboyance at Montblanc. Even at the height of its powers between the thirties and sixties, making functional, practical sports chronographs and pocket timers of all descriptions, it did so with elegance.

Established in 1858 by brothers Charles-Yvan and Hyppolite Robert, the company changed its name to Robert Frères in 1878 and registered the name Minerva in 1887. For the next 40 years it produced watches under a number of dial names, among them the ‘Mercure’, ‘Hertha’, ‘Ariana’ and ‘Tropic’. In 1929 it was renamed Minerva SA, a name that despite not officially existing as a watchmaker since it was bought by the Richemont group in 2006, can be found above the door, on the doormat, on the walls (in the form of vintage signage and poster prints) and in the many cabinets that are scattered throughout the building, each one spilling over with beautiful ephemera. There are also plans to open a mini-museum on the premises next year, and while that move makes obvious sense, there’s something endearing about the way Minerva’s history inhabits the whole building nonetheless. The Robert family moved into the current premises in 1902; inside, original elements remain, such as the ironmongery in the stairwells, but the overall impression is of a functional space, where heavy security doors, large digital displays and bulky machines for cutting and shaping components coexist with parquet flooring and clean off-white walls. 

On the ground floor with the engineers, silence reigns; some are focussed on actual watches at workbenches, others at computer schematics. In terms of workload, the team will be given an overall brief for the year: certain complications to incorporate into a movement, for instance, within certain constraints like size. Working with all the dedication of GCHQ code-breakers, the team members will then set about determining solutions. Some problems, like the design of a new calendar-based movement which has been five years and counting in the making, can take years to complete. 
 

Unsurprisingly, the Villeret Manufacture proudly displays a number of pristine Minerva watches in its fifth-floor boardroom-meets-exhibition-suite. But one floor down is a much bigger treasure trove: a loft full of cases, dials, stamps, components and much more besides, it’s the real archive of Minerva. Here, Art Deco engravings vie for position with kitsch 1970s packaging, design schematics and shelf after shelf of forgotten watches in various states of completeness. When he took over as managing director, Lecamp immersed himself in this history. “The first four months, I read 14 books about Minerva,” he says. “In one of them I found a specific flight bezel used for pilots. We applied for a patent in December 1927.” Recognising that it could provide the sense of visual identity for the front of a watch that the movement’s already delivered from the back, he decided it should become a staple of the brand’s design language. “I asked my team to put this fluted bezel on each new watch from Minerva, so that you immediately recognize the piece and where it’s from.”

It would be wrong to suggest that Minerva is the sole source of style and elegance at Montblanc; increasingly, the world of collector-grade fountain pens with which Montblanc made its name is overlapping with its the haute horlogerie creations.

Lecamp, who since last year has been responsible for the development of Montblanc's 'writing instruments', as it calls them, as well as its watches, is eager to emphasise the connections between the two. In particular, he highlights Montblanc's Nicolas Rieussec line of watches, which run on ValFleurier calibres and have honoured, since 2008, the eponymous watchmaker who created an 'inking chronograph' for the French court in 1821. The literal connection with writing is not lost on anyone – Rieussec’s timer was a chronograph in the most literal sense, dropping blue ink onto rotating discs to time horse races in the Champs de Mars in Paris – but Montblanc’s latest limited-edition watch makes the point in a more thematic way. You’ll find allusions to the world of penmanship in its design: including sketches of the Meisterstück, Montblanc’s flagship pen, inscribed on the watch’s dial and imbued with Super-LumiNova.