Oh that lovely pursuit of the grail watch we are all so familiar with. A rite of passage, a symbol, a myth maybe, the watch we will spend our entire life chasing but perhaps never acquiring. We eagerly pursue that one timepiece that will rule them all, that one which best represents who we are to the outside world, that one piece of daily equipment we want to have as we meander through life’s twists and turns. I believe a grail watch can be everything and anything for each and every one of us. It could cost you $50 or $50,000; be mass-produced in a gigantic factory by machines or meticulously hand-made in a quaint atelier in the Swiss Alps. But have you noticed how so many of us seek to acquire pretty much the same grail watches? A birthyear Omega Speedmaster; a Vacheron Constantin Overseas; an A. Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk? But what about micro and independent brands? What about spending $1,500 instead of $100K? Can this be enough to endow this one timepiece with as much meaning? 

Yes, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking you to spend the next 8 minutes or so reading about a British horological delicacy, the Farer Lander IV GMT 36mm. If you’ve hung out on Mainspring a few times before or know me personally, you would potentially immediately see why this $1,500 watch is my type of grail watch: small and nimble; toolish with a full stack of Arabic numerals; functional with date and GMT complications; sitting in the spec-to-quality-to-price sweet-spot for a micro/indie brand of $1,000 —$2,000. Spend a dollar more and the wearing experience won’t get much better. Spend a dollar below this limit and you won’t get exactly what you have here. But Vincent, you do prefer black or gray dials, you’re right, therefore monochromatic watches, you’re right. But first of all, I seek legible watches and the Lander IV GMT 36mm is darn legible in my opinion. It is also different, singular, and fully spec’ed out. For $1,495 USD on a Sea Green Suede strap you can’t go wrong with this one. 

That is my type of grail watch, so it is. 

Specifications 

For a watch to be grail material for me it has to do two things: be visually pleasing and mechanically sound. You already know how I feel about the former; the latter is quite interesting as you do stretch your dollars quite far with the Lander IV. Looking at this model you also might be wondering why brands don’t make more smaller GMTs, and that is a legitimate question to ask, as these are as rare as the Hope Diamond and as far between from one another as Paris is from Tokyo. One YouTuber woke up a month ago and declared to his hundred of thousands of subscribers that the trend for smaller watches is dead. I don’t believe so. Just like the trend of larger watches didn’t vanish either when the one for smaller timekeeping devices supposedly took over. Brands, globally-speaking, have continued to make watches of all sizes but the media focused on one instead of the other for a while and switched back once it’s decided things had to change because such or such darling brand made a small or big watch. 

Angry much so early in the new year? You bet I do. 

The Farer Lander IV GMT 36mm has been around for a while now and it’s there to say because it makes a lot of sense. First from a dimension standpoint as it measures a true 36mm in diameter, a compact 41.2mm lug-to-lug, a narrow 11mm in thickness, and comes with a perfect 20mm lug width to give it this extra umph on the wrist. With a see-through screw-down case-back made of sapphire and a 5.8 mm push/pull crown, the Lander IV comes with a more than enough 100 meters of water resistance which means you can do most humanly thinkable and realistic activities with it—unless you are a Navy Diver exploring the carcass of a World-War II submarine laying 500 meters below the surface. With a boxed sapphire crystal complete with inner anti-reflective coating on top, you get everyday specs and more, so that you can literally be James Bond and within the same day, jump from an airplane mid-air and land in pool of sharks, then rescue the Damsel in Distress and end up wearing black-tie at His Royal Highness’s daughter birthday party. 

That is the kind of watch this Farer is and I’m really, thoroughly digging it. The everyday timekeeping functionality is ensured by a top grade Sellita SW330-2 “caller” style GMT which ticks at 4Hz, comes with 56 hours of power reserve (enough to sleep through the weekend after such daring adventures) and is regulated in five positions to run at an average ± 4 seconds per day (maximum of ±15 seconds) which is delightful. Since Farer is not fucking around with the Lander IV it didn’t skimp on lume either as the hands, printed hour markers, and printed GMT scale are made of 14 layers of blue-glowing (I assume BGW9) SuperLuminova for superlative nighttime legibility. Which is why the dial is equally easily readable during the day as the white hue of the lume pigment contrasts superbly with the sea green sunray dial. All of this for $1,495 USD on specs alone does explain why, in part, this model is my type of grail watch as it does offer a lot for a relatively reasonable sum of money, all of the horological market considered. 

Design

Visually, the Lander IV GMT 36mm is gorgeous. Obviously. In the past year or so I’ve been thinking a lot about a watch’s proportions in relation to its dial layout and the visual complexity of the latter. Smaller dials should have fewer elements on them in order to make the most essential ones—the hands and hour markers—easy to see so that we can indeed read the time at-a-glance. Larger dials can sustain more complex suites of information since each can be sized appropriately to make the dial easy to read regardless of how much data our brain has to process. Rarely then do I see smaller dials with loads of information which are easy to comprehend even for my middle-aged eyes. And that is the first glorious visual characteristic of this Farer as there are quite a few things we can and need to read and understand in order to take full advantage of this model’s functionality. The British brand seems to have a knack for laying out dials and I particularly like what it did here given the Lander IV’s smaller proportions. 

What first jumps out to me is the combination of the large printed Arabic numerals and syringe hour and minute hands which indicate the local time. The numerals are printed crisply in a modern typeface and pop from the sea green sunburst dial, whilst the hour and minute hands are complemented by a gray pearlescent finish which demarcates them from the dial and gently so from the hour markers which glow white during the day. So reading the time in a jiffy is second nature with the Lander IV. Then Farer, which also excels in colors, painted the A-shaped seconds hand in orange so that one can time an event to the precise second, and the GMT hand in what the brand calls “British pillar box red” which refers to the free-standing mailboxes which appeared in the United Kingdom around the 1860s. Such color combination between the four hands not only makes it easy to differentiate one from the other and also to compartmentalize each one’s function. Doing such plays with colors and shapes is what in part explains why a 36mm GMT is so darn legible. 

I am of the lonely school of thought that a GMT should always be accompanied by a date aperture and I don’t understand the recent fascination for date-less traveler’s watches. If you bother adding a GMT complication to watch so that, in theory, it’s easier to track time in a second timezone because you’re too darn busy to do mental calculus, you certainly also need to easily know what date it is. Well, now that my little rant is over, let’s continue to dissect the dial layout of the Lander IV GMT 36mm: outside of the printed hour markers and inhabiting the same plane we find the small but legible GMT scale printed in a yellow/creamy color which adds more definition to the numerals and dots which indicate the even and odd hours. Beyond that, a small minute track printed on a narrow and elevated rehaut on which the five-minute increments are indicated by blue numerals and the minutes by truncated railroads which put the emphasis on each minute. At the center and at the lowest level we find the brand’s logo and some text. 

Now, you’ve noticed the small porthole date aperture composed of white printed numerals on a color-matched date-disc. Many brands do that now but Farer’s genius was to use the same bespoke typeface of the hour markers for the date numerals, so tall and condensed numerals, so that it is easy to read the date regardless of how small their printing is. That is indeed the trait of a brand which has thought about everything and which has created a winning recipe for a smaller, complex, and legible watch. And just as much as the dial is gorgeous to look at, so is the case, and the latter, by its design and finish, contributes in making the Lander IV such a versatile timekeeping device. Indeed, the Rolex Oyster-Perpetual-like fully polished and rounded case flanks endow this model with a fancy flair, whilst the step-construction of the mid-case + bezel + boxed sapphire crystal adds a touch of vintage elegance*. The icing on the cake is the distinctive bronze-capped rounded crown which adds a last piece of personality to a character-full package. 

*If not a step-construction I see the side profile of the Michelin Man belly. 

The Heart of the Matter

Our personal preferences for smaller or larger watches is, well, personal. No one should dictate what you should buy. No journalist, no YouTuber, no influencer, no market trend report. The danger, however, is when the watch media invests so much time and energy repeating the same erroneous message that brands take their commentary for gospel and therefore decide to make smaller or larger watches. Even though I don’t know Farer well, looking at how its catalog has evolved in the past few years (of stocking the brand online waiting patiently to get the Lander IV GMT 36mm in my French paws) I can tell that this British house of watchmaking doesn’t really follow the artificial trends but instead creates its own. When you read, listen, and watch the watch media today you would think that this 36mm gem has no place on the market and that Farer should have only made a 39mm version of it. But the brand, thank Genta, saw the benefit of making a more compact version of its best-selling GMT—my type of grail watch. 

So at the heart of the matter is this: the Lander IV GMT 36mm shouldn’t exist but it does, and I for one am glad it is here as it is one of the most singular field-type, everyday-inspired GMTs I have ever come across. For $1,495 on the suede strap it is hell of a deal I’m currently saving up for to add one to my nerdy watch collection. So it will happen I tell ya. 

Conclusion

As far as my Google Search skills go, it seems that the first iteration of the Farer Lander GMT appeared in 2018 in a 39.5mm case. Its design has been tweaked throughout the years and versions—and Farer has made several colorful iterations of it—to land (ah ah) on the fourth iteration in 2023 and in two sizes, including this superb 36mm version. That means the British brand has been making and selling this model for the past two years which seems odd for a micro/indie brand to do as most phase out models only a few short months after they were released. This further means that Farer sees the Lander IV GMT 36mm has a mainstay in its collection and as a watch anyone can acquire at whatever moment they’ve come to reason to add such a piece into their watch box. Which is why I like to review models which aren’t necessarily the latest but those which float my boat the most. 

Thanks for reading.