HANDS-ON: The Montblanc Heritage Spirit Orbis Terrarum

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We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again. Montblanc are the up and coming contenders when it comes to smart and stylish mid-level complications.

The Montblanc Heritage Spirit Orbis Terrarum is a seriously impressive package. It offers a truly useful (and on-trend) complication, distinctive (yet not in-your-face) good looks and a compelling value proposition. The Orbis Terrarum is a perfect option for those who are frequent enough flyers to find at a glance global time useful, but who aren’t yet at the level of private jets.

The Orbis Terrurm is a classic worldtime complication, with an outer dial dominated by a ring of important global cities and an outer ring displaying 24 hour time. While it looks complicated it’s surprisingly intuitive. Using the pusher at eight set the city ring so that your home city is at 6, and then set the local time as normal. So in these pictures the watch is set to Moscow time, where it’s ten past ten in the morning. Once this is done you can, at a glance read the current time in any of the 24 timezones. Handy stuff.

Montblanc have added an extra layer (literally) of complexity by adding a day/night indicator to the centre of the dial. The continents of the northern hemisphere are cut out of the sapphire dial, exposing the lower day/night layer – half of which is white and half of which is blue to represent day and night. While this is a useful function, its primary appeal is form. The rich blues of the central dial look beautiful, and while there’s a lot going on here, Montblanc have managed to harmonise all the elements so that all the noise is more orchestra then racket.

Aside from looking great and being functional the 41mm Orbis Terrarum is the right price too. Coming in at under $8,000 the Orbis Terrarum is competitive. Sure, part of this is an aggressive pricing strategy on the part of Montblanc to carve out a larger niche of the fine watch market, but it’s also clever production. For example they’ve used a cost effective stock ebauche and placed their own, in-house modular worldtime complication on top of it. Sure, they could have made an entire movement from scratch and it would look very pretty, but it would also cost four times as much. Montblanc are being incredibly smart by picking a gap in the market – that gap being mid-tier, non-sporty functional complications (annual calendars, dual time, world time, etc). They’ve identified a gap and they’re delivering extremely solid, well-priced watches. And honestly, in this space, no one else is currently in the same league.

Montblanc Heritage Spirit Orbis Terrarum Australian pricing

The Orbis Terrarum in steel has a retail price of $7750

Images by Kristian Dowling/Time+Tide Images.