By playing with its profile, you can give your yacht a character that is more majestic or more dynamic, more classical or more modern.

Let the fun begin

From the moment we first sit down together the project revolves around what you wish to do with your yacht… It really is great fun spending time working through your likes and requirements, where you’d like to go and how you’d like to get there. The design brief starts with nothing but – quite literally – a blank piece of paper. We brainstorm about what it is you are looking for in terms of how you like to relax, potential sailing areas, likely uses and your family situation, including how that might change in the coming years, affecting who is onboard your Feadship.

You give us the challenges and we will create a highly individual design brief, including moodboards that will help to create the right direction for the design theme as well as to capture the main purposes of the yacht. The idea here is to give you a genuine feeling of the type of experience you can expect to have onboard your Feadship, whether that be super sporty or ultra-chilled-out, partying in warm regions or exploring the Arctic (or the other way round of course!).

Looking good

Around this time we will also turn to the subject of the exterior profile. You may well not have any fixed views on how an exterior should look like and would prefer to develop that with us. The key is to do so in small steps. You can say whether you like more classic or modern; whether you enjoy the look of a boat that is dynamic and fast or have a preference for more static lines. Discussing your favourite cars, works of art or any other source of inspiration could be used to create a design theme and the sort of curves that you might like.

Guided by your personal preferences for the look and feel of the yacht, we will make sure your yacht will have a natural harmony and coherence as well as complies with our design philosophy.

Compare and contrast

Sometimes it can be helpful to look at other Feadships to see what you like about certain yachts and don’t like about others. A particular fondness for a specific Feadship could be a great inspiration. However in almost all cases people want something more personal and our challenge is to create that in reality together. We believe every new Feadship should be better than the last and that includes yours. This is why we are very careful not to lead the witness but to make sure that whatever you envisage is truly based upon your taste.  There may have been layout benefits and facilities which you found particularly suited to the way you enjoy spending time at sea on another Feadship, which is great input for your perfect stay on board, but we believe it is important to go a step deeper and love to find out what it is, that will make the experience personal for you.

The first lines

Another early step is to discuss volume distribution. This is one of the most impactful factors on an exterior and also has a great deal of influence on the general arrangement. Adding or removing a deck, or shifting the transition from bow to aft, affects the balance. The further forward the superstructure, the more you have an ‘explorer’ profile. Further aft gives you a more dynamic profile while a higher superstructure creates a more static profile.

Although all these factors can be discussed without drawing a line, we do have to start drawing lines at around this stage. This is what we call the Leitmotiv of the yacht, the essence of a design that can be illustrated in a few strokes of a pencil. If you look at any yacht in the distance and squint your eyes you will see these lines. Every Feadship is recognisable by them and they are our starting point.

Several proposals based upon these lines will be the source of our next round of discussions. By playing with this profile, you can give your yacht a character that is more majestic or more dynamic, more classical or more modern. We go into more detail and start to develop the complete profile by talking about the exterior details. Bows and sterns have enormous influence. Whether half or full-length, straight or curved, the shape, spacing, colour, size and positioning of your windows and mullions will also have a huge impact on the overall look-and-feel of your Feadship.

Allocating experiences

The same applies to the uses of the yacht, which are all related to the different features onboard. Again, we don’t have to have a complete layout or general arrangement at the outset… We find that is more useful to focus on the areas of most importance to you. Perhaps you would like a special beach club or a really large stateroom or a dedicated party area. From a squash court to an observation retreat, from an exploration room to a crow’s nest, there are so many possibilities, and the only limitations are those imposed on us by nature.

Once you’re happy with our feature proposals, we move on to the basic layout. From a rough draft, we define areas such as guest suites, lounges, crew accommodation, and engine room placement. At this stage, we also optimise logistics to ensure smooth circulation—allowing you and your guests to move freely while the crew provides discreet, unobtrusive service.

These foundational ideas have to be worked out in order to give us an idea of the total volume of your Feadship. Once we have that, we can start thinking about the main dimensions. And with the length and beam established we can start filling out the general arrangement, putting in the staircases, organising the bathrooms in the suites, creating the connections to the outside deck, organising where the stores will be.

All of this information will go into the first plan. After you approve that we can go on to the phase of entering all the technical spaces, putting in all the doors, adding the furniture – all the items needed to generate a proper general arrangement. We make a detailed profile at this stage including a 3D model so you get a really good idea of how your Feadship is going to look.

Another important aspect is the equipment you would like onboard. Is your Feadship a normal-speed boat or do you want to go faster? How green do you want to go in terms of technology? This gives us enough information to make a more detailed specification for the whole yacht.

Room for manoeuvre

Throughout all these different phases there is plenty of room for manoeuvre in terms of making adjustments and changing course. Once we have reached the stage of being able to make a rendering to add to all the above, and are able to take another Feadship interior as a reference point in terms of styling, detailing and complexity, we can give you a firm price quote.

While every Feadship is uniquely tailored, our structured design process ensures we move efficiently toward a build contract once your key decisions and preferences are confirmed. Thanks to our extensive experience across a wide range of custom projects, we can provide an accurate budget early on, giving you confidence to commit without delay.

Trust and confidence

While all this information could theoretically be used by another yard to build a superyacht, there will be many differences in that build which would ultimately mean you will not receive a Feadship. Like everything we have discussed here, it all comes down to having the trust and confidence that Feadship can deliver. All I will say is that decades of successful builds and repeat clients serve as the ultimate reference point.

Feadship does do more in-house than any other motoryacht builder when it comes to the integration of construction, piping and interior, enabling us to make more efficient use of space. Moreover we have long-term relationships with all our suppliers and co-makers that surpass anything else. These companies are used to delivering Feadship quality for a Feadship build, and even have their own separate Feadship department to ensure the highest standard of equipment. So even if someone was to take the design/specifications to another yard and ask to work with the same suppliers as Feadship, the end result would be something else altogether.

Down to business

As you often hear Feadship clients say, nothing beats designing and detailing your own one-off and entirely individual Feadship. There is also a period of around a year where we are defining the interior, during which time you can still change the layout of rooms if not the basic structural items. 

As we come closer to delivery there is a moment for adding your personal touches to the interior decorative scheme such as artworks. Of course the degree to which you are involved in all or any of this is entirely your choice. You can leave as much to the interior designer as you wish, resting assured that Feadship is going ahead on the right course.