Yachts International Winter 2020

Cars and boats have been joined at the hip since the dawn of the trailer hitch. But in recent years, carmakers—particularly those that build luxury and high performance vehicles—have dabbled in co-branding boats. They hope, I suppose, to capture (and capitalize upon) the organic kinship they perceive between those who love the water as much as they do the open road. These attempts have generated mixed commercial results, but have produced some seriously sexy watercraft. Projects created or branded by the likes of Ferrari, Jaguar, Aston Martin, Mercedes, Bugatti and others have pushed the limits of how we perceive the humble boat: more works of art than industrial products. As with concept cars at auto shows, such projects charge our emotional circuits and leave us feeling wired to the future.…

The decision whether to build new or buy pre-owned is a tough one, not least because the freedom to customize a superyacht is offset by having to wait the three years or more for the finished product. It was a compromise the owner of the 213-foot (65-meter) Admiral Life Saga was willing to make. He already had a fleet of yachts of various shapes and sizes, including a pre-owned 138-foot (42-meter) Heesen of the same name and the refitted shadow vessel Mystere, when he was lured by the promise of a brand-new, shiny toy. “The owner had always bought used yachts and refitted them to his own purpose, but we’d been talking about a bigger boat for a couple of years, and he wanted something that was more his own,”…

Bow on, as she cuts through the water, the 262-foot (79.9-meter) Abeking & Rasmussen Excellence looks like a spaceship. Winch Design gave her a reverse bow, double-height mirrored glass and flying-saucer-shaped pods that are visible fore and aft on each deck. The bow swoops back a full 33 feet before joining the line of the main deck. Ignacio Oliva-Velez, head of interiors at Winch Design, compares the shape to the beak of an American bald eagle. At the waterline, the stem, machined from a solid piece of stainless steel, had to be constructed with a particular angle of flare. To increase buoyancy and improve wave-breaking, there’s a bulbous bow hidden below the waterline. Underwater lights are angled backwards, to exhibit forward motion even at anchor. The yacht, overall, is built…

‘You have to think about the fenders around the swim platform, the knuckle lines and the precise angle or slope of the bow. All these things are three-dimensional features that you have to kind of amass in your mind and think about how it would look as it rotates and how the sun shines on it and how the shadows follow the form of the boat.’—Volpini 2 designer Tim Heywood You can quarry a ton of information from a yacht underway that you can’t at the dock. Such was the case a while back on a lunch cruise down the Riviera from Monaco to Cannes on Volpini 2, the Amels 188 from the Dutch builder’s Limited Editions range. On board were longtime Limited Editions designer Tim Heywood, Volpini 2’s interior…

Audace—Italian for audacious—is not what most would call a pretty boat. With five decks including a tank deck, she sits high in the water for a 140-footer (42.8-meter), and her chunky profile appears to be a touch top-heavy. But aesthetics were never a priority for her owner, who was far more interested in the practicalities of building a yacht that would be his floating home for much of the year. “Most yachts are designed for people who might spend two or three weeks on board each year, but my situation is very different,” says Andrea Merloni, whose family founded the Indesit brand of appliances that is now part of Whirlpool. “Firstly, I wanted a real explorer, not a floating palace full of marble and gold taps. Secondly, I wanted the…

When Marquis Yachts CEO Rob Parmentier talks about the Lexus LY 650, he looks like a father whose son just caught the game-winning touchdown. Car companies trying to break into the yacht market is not a new phenomenon, and not always a successful one. Ferrari collaborated with Riva Yacht in 1990 to create the Riva Ferrari 32; both companies had major capital and strong reputations, but only 30 of the boats were ever built. More recently, Mercedes-Benz partnered with Silver Arrow Marine on a limited-edition sport yacht. Very limited edition. And the Aston Martin AM37, which went viral online a few years ago, seems to have crawled into obscurity. Akio Toyoda, president of Lexus’ parent company, Toyota Motor Corp., is now trying to achieve what those before him have failed…