Welcome to the special “20th Anniversary” section of Top Yacht Design. Here we present to you, day by day, the best stories, yachts, characters we have covered in these 20 years of Top Yacht Design, from 2006 to the present day.
Taken from Top Yacht Design no. 9 / 2017, pp. 50-56
Luca Dini, creative stamp
Eclectic and innovative, Luca Dini is one of the fathers of yacht design in the third millennium. We visited him in 2019 to get his story and philosophy.
It’s virtually impossible to fail to recognise an environment designed by Luca Dini when you meet him. Even when décor and furnishings fall outside his traditional stylistic canons, the Florentine designer’s creative flair can be sensed on the fly. And don’t dictate whether it’s a superyacht or an Art Nouveau villa, Dini’s locco is there, and it shows. And this is, perhaps, his greatest merit, that of always managing to leave a trace, a recognizable and decisive imprint. His are some of the boats that have changed the history of yacht design. How can we not remember in 1998 the Sophie Blue by CBI Navi that surprised with its exterior lines and color palettes? Or the Sea Force One of 2009, the boat where everything was possible and nothing taken for granted, which literally revolutionized the very philosophy of yacht design. Dini is also involved in residential and has a passion for car design, but boating remains his great love. A love that began when, having moved to Livorno with his family, he saw the Nabila, an 86-meter Benelli, moored in the harbor. “Shortly after that I went to intern at Pierluigi Spadolini ‘s studio in Florence where Francesco Paszkowski was also. I stayed there for 10 years, and in 1996 I opened my own studio,” he says. “The early days were tough; I couldn’t afford to rent premises, so I turned my boyhood room into a studio and my mom into my secretary. No one knew it, but to this day, for Easter and Christmas, my mother still hears from some of the owners of the time.” From there on, the successes went on unabated.
But Dini is not one of those egoriferous yacht designers who tend to impose their tastes at the expense of the client’s. “When you have to design a boat, it always starts with a chat in which the owner tries to explain what kind of yacht he wants, but during which he rarely says what he wants; more often he says what he likes,” Dini explains, “the designer’s sensitivity lies in understanding whether the person in front of him likes to take risks or not, and in being able to interpret his dreams and then give them shape. But woe betide imposing yourself. I want those who enter a boat or a house designed by me for the first time to be able to say ‘I feel at home,’ not just ‘how beautiful.'” His Florence studio works almost exclusively on custom boats. “Yes, and that’s the most exciting part of my job,” he explains. “Designers are divided into two macro categories: those who have a defined style and those, on the other hand, who I call ‘curious,’ who are eclectic and like to confront all kinds of proposals.” Luca Dini, it goes without saying, belongs to the second category. Not surprisingly, right now he is working on many different projects, three of them illustrative. “In addition to a Benelli 58 whose interior we are taking care of, I am following the refiitting of a 6o-meter Expedition Vessel built by an Australian shipyard. It is a boat reminiscent of the Force Blue by Fabio Briatore and will have a contemporary, colorful and light interior to contrast the extremely strict exterior lines,” he says.
But the project he is most passionate about is the refitting in Amels of an 80-meter yacht. “It’s a fantastic boat,” Dini explains, “and I’m having the time of my life. The owner is a visionary and demanded that each environment be different from the other. When it is finished it will be even more revolutionary than the Sea Force One in its day. Projects like this rarely happen, but when it does, it’s like a dream come true. And a yacht designer only needs one now and then to fulfill his creative follies.” Creative follies in which Luca Dini is assisted by an exceptional staff. His studios today are two: one in Florence and one in Forte dei Marmi where a couple of years la opened a branch inside Forte In, a workshop that often supplies him with furniture for the boats as well. His right-hand man for interior design is Carlotta Malatesta, a very talented young woman from Carrara who started in yacht design in 2006 and shares Dini’s vision. “Luca leaves a lot of space for his collaborators,” she explains, “but he often indexes meetings that we all attend to give the whole studio an overview of the projects we are working on. That’s the only way you can really do teamwork,” he concludes.
Carlotta is also the link between Luca and the rest of the studio whose most trusted collaborators are Marco Bucciarelli for exteriors and Massimo Caselli for graphics. It remains to be found out which boat Luca and Carlotta are most fond of and which regrets the most. The answer is common to both of them: the boat they love most is the Sea Force One, the biggest regret that of not having been able to make Valentino Garavani‘s boat, a 72-meter designed for Admiral and Mariotti, the design of which they had already sketched out but which was never built. Too bad, it would have been interesting to see the fruit of the joint work of one of the world’s most famous designers and a great and eclectic yacht designer.
By Giulia Tinkraf Photo by Giovanni Malgarini
