I heard about this new brand on a group podcast – possibly it was a replay of a Clubhouse (RIP) call? When Spanish Rob asked several well-known collectors what they thought of Furlan Marri – “Mr Grey”, they reacted with mild disgust and stated we should never waste our money on such an unworthy project.

I had to look up the brand. Info was scarce at first. Luckily my man-crush (and yours, probably) at Revolution Watch started kicking out Instagram stories featuring prototypes and stating his preference for the Furlan Marri “Mr Grey”. I signed up for updates & bought just the one watch on the launch date for about 350 USD.

Damn. I should’ve bought three of these. Chrono24 much? Prices have gone cray-zee!! Especially the Havana Salmon version. No regrets: My Furlan Marri “Mr Grey” is freaking beautiful. It fills the ‘dress watch’ void in my current hoard of watches. And I don’t know how the owners of FM succeeded in getting Asian manufacturers to build finely detailed dials and cases that look BETTER under a macro lens, at this price, but they did. It bodes very well for future projects, which will be hand-wind or automatic or eventually both.

Specs: 38mm wide, 46mm lug-lug, 20mm lug width, 11.5mm thick; weight 52 grams, accuracy ~perfect over 14 days. The Seiko VK64 works identically to the one I might (hypothetically) own in a $65 Pagani Design ‘Playtona’ except they’ve skipped the 1-hertz tick tick tick running seconds hand (thank you) and the date function. Left subdial is a 60-minute chrono counter, right subdial is a 24-hour scale. The result is the dial shows precisely the layout you’d get – for the price of a small Tuscan villa – on a Patek 1463 Romans dial.

I like all the design decisions that are evident in the Furlan Marri “Mr Grey”. I’m guessing the GPHG 2021 jury may agree: this exact model has been nominated for the Challenge award and several quite snobby watch snobs have already declared it the runaway winner. I’ll just declare it a bargain.