Furlan Marri’s Disco Volante Watch Is Out of This World
Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire’s regular column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world.
As a design, the disco volante—or “flying saucer” in Italian—has been around in watchmaking at least since the 1930s. But it had a definite purple patch in the late sixties and early seventies, when the space race turned people’s heads toward the stars and, at the same time, dressier Swiss watch brands woke up to the possibilities of sexing up their high-end watches to appeal to a younger-minded audience.
The flying-saucer name came from the eye-catching, lugless design, typically with a slim gold case and a wide, flat bezel. With dressier vintage watches now driving collections, vintage hounds have been pushing up the prices of disco volantes from that golden period by Omega, Audemars Piguet, Vacheron, Jaeger-LeCoultre, and more for a while now. But this unique style of watch is also garnering a lot of interest in one maker in a much more affordable price bracket.
Last week, Furlan Marri, a lesser-known brand out of Geneva, launched its own take on the disco volante in three styles that bridge the retro-contemporary gap in a compelling way. Furlan Marri specializes in what could be described as homages to the greats in the dress-watch canon—but that description isn’t entirely fair. It belies the transparent amount of work that has gone into both the intricacy of these designs and the quality of the finishing. Both give Furlan Marri a legitimacy and a wearability all its own.
Disco Celeste
furlanmarri.com
The disco volante comes in steel with dials in three color choices—Havana (brown), Celeste (blue), and Verde (green)—accented with Luminova rings around the sector dial design that give the watches a modern demeanor after dark. While the Peseux 7001 hand-wound movement is no Rolls-Royce, the brand has spent a lot of time adding the sort of hand finishing (visible through the sapphire case back) for which you’d normally expect to pay a good deal more.
For collectors after something dressy but intriguingly different (and not too spendy), the Furlan Marri Disco Volante may well be the perfect storm—if you can snag one, that is. Since its founding in 2021 by Andrea Furlan and Hamad Al Marri, the brand has released its watches in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it limited editions. But unlike previous one-off launches, the newest trio of watches will be repeated in further editions.
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