Where clocks were once made, your stay now begins.
The Hotel FederWERK in St. Georgen in the Black Forest is located in the former factory building of the Tobias Baeuerle & Söhne watch factory. For about 130 years, the company was one of the city’s largest manufacturers of watches and precision engineering devices. The Papst family of entrepreneurs from St. Georgen acquired the site and, beginning in 2016, converted it into a hotel featuring the FeinWERK restaurant; the FederWERK opened in 2018.
Today, each of its 51 rooms tells a chapter from over 300 years of Black Forest industrial and innovation history.
Where products were once manufactured, assembled, and developed, you’ll now find tranquility, clarity, and contemporary comfort—without the building ever losing sight of its origins. The FederWERK is not a museum. It is a building with a past that quietly but consistently continues to tell its story.
Hotel FederWERK
- Address: Museumstraße 1, 78112 St. Georgen im Schwarzwald
- Building: former Tobias Baeuerle & Söhne clock factory (1864–1994)
- Conversion: from 2016 by the Papst family of entrepreneurs
- Opening: 2018
- Rooms: 51 – each dedicated to a person, a company or a product
- Time span: more than 300 years, from the wooden-geared clock to XR learning software
- Dining: Restaurant FeinWERK and Rooftop 360° Bar
From clockmaker’s workshop to clock factory: Tobias Baeuerle & Söhne
The story of the company begins with a man who had to start working young. Tobias Baeuerle (1841–1914) came from a family of watchmakers in Stockwald, a side valley of St. Georgen. His father died when he was young; as a shepherd boy and caretaker of his younger siblings, he helped out with relatives at the “Bruderhaus”. After completing his training, he opened his own watchmaking workshop in Brigach in 1864—with one journeyman and one apprentice.
Later, Tobias Baeuerle moved to St. Georgen and, in 1875, built a new, larger factory and residential building on Bahnhofstraße. Starting in 1888, he produced precision regulator pendulum clocks, whose wooden cases were made in his own carpentry shop. In 1903, he brought his sons Christian and Tobias on as partners—and the workshop became the company Tobias Baeuerle & Sons.
The company grew into one of the largest makers of clocks and precision instruments in St. Georgen. Alongside domestic clocks it produced highly accurate signal clocks for beacons on lightships, meters for liquids, timing clocks for pigeon races and printing and recording mechanisms for cash registers. In 1964 the firm celebrated its centenary with 650 employees. The company history ended in bankruptcy in 1994 – but the traces of the factory have remained.
A school of precision
People who later wrote chapters of their own learned and worked in Tobias Baeuerle’s workshops: Otto Rapp began his clockmaking apprenticeship here in 1912 and later designed an anaesthesia stopwatch for the Dräger works. Dieter Grässlin trained here before developing the world’s first time switch in a standard housing size in 1963. Christoph Jäckle was a design engineer in the building for more than four decades from 1921. Rooms at FederWERK are dedicated to all of them today.
Why is the hotel called FederWERK?
The name is not a decorative image but a statement of intent. It brings two worlds together: the feather-light calm of arriving and the mechanical precision of industrial work. At the same time a Federwerk – a spring mechanism – is exactly what was built in St. Georgen for generations: the spring drive that set clocks, gramophones and toy motors in motion. This tension between lightness and precision shapes the whole house – in its architecture, its design and its atmosphere.
Restaurant FeinWERK carries that heritage in its name too: it recalls the precision engineering for which St. Georgen became known far beyond the Black Forest.
From factory building to Hotel FederWERK
Even after clock production ended, the building remained a place of technology: in 2002, for example, Peter Sterman’s young clamping-technology company moved into renovated design offices in the former Baeuerle building. The Papst family of entrepreneurs from St. Georgen later acquired the site.
From 2016 the factory was carefully converted into a hotel, and in 2018 Hotel FederWERK opened with Restaurant FeinWERK.
For the Papst family this closes a circle. Back in 1948 the inventor Hermann Papst had started his motor production in the buildings of a former St. Georgen clock factory – the Philipp Haas & Söhne company.
Today you can find traces of the old factory building everywhere in the house. Not only the rooms, but the corridors and stairwells too tell of the industrial history of the hill town of St. Georgen.
Five stories that hold the house together
Behind the 51 rooms stand five great narratives that you will meet throughout the building:
- Time – from the first clockmaker to the electronic time switch
- Sound – gramophones, record changers and turntables by DUAL and Perpetuum-Ebner
- Motion – motors, fans and drives from Hermann Papst to ebm-papst
- Precision – machines, tools and clamping technology, accurate to a few thousandths of a millimetre
- Future – medical technology, digitalisation and virtual learning
You do not need to know any of this to feel at home at FederWERK. The history works through design, detail and atmosphere. And if your curiosity is roused, you can dive in as deeply as you like.
The Papst family
Inventor, entrepreneur, builder: how Hermann Papst shaped St. Georgen with around 1,000 technical concepts – and why his family stands behind FederWERK today.
Room stories
51 rooms, 51 stories: from a wooden-geared clock made in 1730 to XR learning software. Find out who your room is dedicated to.
