The BOAT Artistry and Craft Awards recognise the finest craftsmanship in superyacht design. They are, by definition, awards for another world. A world most of us will never inhabit.
When we purchased our Jeanneau Sunkiss 49, it came with exactly one decorative item aboard: a race photograph, a relic of the Clear Communications sponsorship of New Zealand Endeavour in the Whitbread Around the World Yacht Race. It didn’t last long. On a boat that size, sentiment quickly loses out to practicality. Every square metre has to earn its keep.
Which raises an interesting question. Where does art belong on a boat at all?
Years ago I attended a series of talks by Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things. He held up a lemon squeezer, not an expensive one, but one shaped like something out of a science fiction film, all legs and angles, closer to an H.G. Wells tripod than a kitchen utensil. It was completely impractical in several respects and utterly memorable in all of them. Norman’s point was simple: when an object carries a degree of playfulness, it crosses a line. It stops being just useful and starts being something else. You remember it. You talk about it.
Reading through this year’s award winners, that idea kept coming back. The objects that earn a place in our memory aren’t necessarily the most refined or the most expensive. They’re the ones that carry something of the person who made them, that change with use rather than wearing out, that get better as time passes rather than worse. An old timber yacht hull says things a fibreglass one simply cannot.
Eva Mechler’s sinks aboard the Alia Yachts 50-metre ALY501 make that argument in a wet area, of all places. Carved from smoked sweet chestnut and treated with plant-based oils, they are an unlikely choice for a marine environment. Timber in a bathroom on a boat? It expands, it contracts, it demands attention. Mechler made that choice deliberately, because synthetic materials, however durable, don’t develop character. Those sinks will look more at home on that vessel in a decade than they do today.
Alexandra Llewellyn reimagined the backgammon board for the 79.5-metre Feadship Valor, taking a format unchanged for millennia and making it circular. Twenty-four points for twenty-four hours. Twelve sections mirroring the zodiac. Silver wire and mother-of-pearl constellations across figured timber, a hand-drawn water motif running continuously around the surface through marquetry. Two further boards complete the set: Eat or Be Eaten, a marine tournament game, and a solitaire board in ancient bog oak populated with sharks and rays. Each piece engineered for stability at sea.
Zena Holloway came to object-making via three decades behind an underwater camera. Watching coral bleach and fish populations collapse, she concluded that documentation wasn’t enough. Her wall lights for the Cantiere delle Marche explorer yacht Nasiba are grown rather than manufactured, willow roots and mycelium harvested from a riverbank and shaped into form. The material had a life before it became a light fitting.
Tokyo metalsmith Yoshinori Nagashima received a Judges’ Commendation for a hand-forged cutlery commission through Winch Design. The numbers alone are striking: 600 pieces, 14 original designs, every single one prototyped and tested by hand before production. Stainless steel, a resolutely industrial material, worked until it stopped feeling industrial. The result sits in a galley drawer on a superyacht and gets picked up three times a day.
None of this translates directly to a 15-metre sailing yacht. The constraints and priorities are different and too immediate. But that doesn’t mean the instinct is wrong. A little art, a little playfulness, a little whimsy fits on any boat. Unless weight is the issue. In which case, it’s a different conversation entirely.
Check out the full BOAT International article.
