A custom superyacht is among the most expensive assets anyone can own: hundreds of millions of dollars, years in the yard, and a project in which — quite literally — every square metre counts. Little wonder the major builders are rethinking the build process itself, as the programme with which Oceanco has rewritten the rules of full custom demonstrates. And yet, to hear it from those who sign off these projects, the real frontier of customisation is no longer the one you can see from the quayside. Not the profile, not the silhouette: but the way the owner lives out the day on board.
Speaking to Business Insider, Bart Bouwhuis and Marnix Hoekstra, co-creative directors of Vripack — the Dutch naval architecture and interior design studio that has designed yachts for billionaires and members of the Saudi royal family — set it out plainly. “Ultimately, the object needs to fulfill the requirements of the day, the evening, and the night,” says Bouwhuis. “It’s a puzzle.” And the exterior aesthetic, he adds, is almost a garment: “The outside you could consider more or less a dress: you can dress up any layout with a modern dress or a classic dress.”
Beneath that dress, however, what owners are asking for is changing. And the signals coming out of the Sneek studio sketch a rather precise map of where custom is heading.
The gym is no longer enough: enter the hyperbaric chamber
The first trend is a child of the longevity obsession sweeping the ultra-wealthy. Where once an owner would settle for a hotel-style gym — no windows, some free weights — “those days are gone”, says Hoekstra. Recent requests fielded by Vripack include Bikram-style hot yoga studios, kickboxing areas and even a hyperbaric chamber for oxygen therapy, the treatment championed by the antiaging gurus.
There is a functional logic here too, beyond the fashion: “You don’t walk a lot on a boat,” Hoekstra observes. “A treadmill or bike, both of them are very nice pieces of equipment to keep your muscles going.” The real challenge, if anything, is an engineering one: finding a space on board with sufficient headroom for the larger machines, and properly enclosing and climate-controlling a room that generates heat and humidity.
WFY: work from yacht
The second trend comes with an acronym modelled on remote working: after WFH, work from yacht. “Life is blurring between private and business and between being on the boat and off the boat,” Hoekstra explains. Two forces are at play. On one side, post-pandemic workplace flexibility; on the other, the steady rejuvenation of the owner demographic — ever less the stereotypical retiree, ever more likely to be professionally active.
Technology is what makes it all possible: Starlink’s satellite connectivity has turned the video call in the middle of the Mediterranean from a gamble into a routine. The yacht thus ceases to be purely a place of decompression and becomes a hybrid platform, where the meeting room coexists with the beach club.
The comfort paradox: being at sea without moving
“Since the beginning of mankind, we want to be out at the sea, and we don’t want to move,” smiles Hoekstra. “It’s a little bit of a paradox.” The answer is twofold. On one hand, stabilisers — a mature technology, and one that keeps improving. On the other — and this is where design makes the difference — the growing capacity of software to model the motion of every single point on the hull, which allows designers to work to specific sea states: a yacht destined only for the Mediterranean requires stabilising systems calibrated to that basin. With very concrete consequences for the layout, starting with the position of the master cabin and the bed, chosen to minimise seasickness.
The Zero effect: low-hanging-fruit sustainability
The fourth trend bears Vripack‘s own signature: Zero, the 69-metre ketch built by Vitters with naval architecture by Dykstra Naval Architects, designed to sail entirely without fossil fuels — a project whose launch and Foundation Zero open-source platform Top Yacht Design has covered.
The most interesting effect, Hoekstra explains, concerns not the yacht itself but the way it has shifted the mindset of other clients: from avoiding anything that smacked of environmentalism to picking the “low-hanging fruit” of sustainability, starting with giving up oversized engines. “‘Can I get a bigger engine?’ That’s just so 80s,” Hoekstra says, cutting the matter short. “Why would you pick a heavy four-by-four Jeep to drive to a meeting in Manhattan?”
In practice: better insulation and heat-reflective paint to reduce the demand for air conditioning, AC systems that switch off when a cabin empties, and a farewell to teak — the historic decking material, abandoned for the deforestation it causes. With alternatives now available, Hoekstra concludes, “it doesn’t really make sense not to do it”.
It is a trajectory the market confirms well beyond the gates of Sneek: witness SHE, the heritage navetta with which Sanlorenzo has brought Volvo Penta IPS hybrid propulsion to a project with a vintage soul — five units sold before the first hull even touched the water. A sign that the demand for efficiency and restraint, at the top end of the market, is no longer a niche: it is the new language of custom.
