In mid-May, Amor à Vida, a new superyacht, set out on her maiden voyage. The boat,  which features a sleek and sloped white exterior, made its photogenic debut at the Ferretti Group shipyard in Ancora, Italy, earlier this year. But what’s inside the boat remains a mystery — to most. 

Italian design firm Nuvolari Lenard, responsible for both the exterior and interior styling, possesses an intimate understanding of the yacht, which boasts eco-friendly systems onboard.

“ Nobody comes here to get a copy of something else,” says Dan Lenard, whose three-plus decade design collaboration with business partner Carlo Nuvolari melds technical engineering and aesthetic design. “Each of [our boats] is iconic enough to be a brand by itself, so that really forces us every time to invent something completely different and speak a completely different language in design.” 

Nuvolari Lenard was responsible for the striking exterior design of the 122-meter Kismet, built by German shipyard Lürssen, which launched last year and won motor yacht of the year at the most recent Superyacht Awards. 

Kismet’s exterior features an elongated stainless steel bow with a leaping jaguar — a nod to owner Shahid Khan’s NFL team, the Jacksonville Jaguars. “Nothing looks like Kismet right now,” claims Lenard, describing its design as “neoclassical” and “postmodern.” “Now, Kismet sets the standards.”

The world’s 50 largest yachts all fall in the 110-plus-meter range, with the largest currently topping out at 180 meters. While Kismet has received a lot of attention since its launch, other impressive yachts fly intentionally under the radar.

“Boats like Nord are very private, very silent, going to very remote places where there is a lack of Instagram-chasers,” Lenard says of the 141-meter Lürssen-built boat, currently owned by Severstal chairman Alexei Mordashov, describing it as “probably the most complex boat ever built.” 

“Unfortunately, it’s also so private that there’s not really much known about it,” he says. “Nord is built to go basically anywhere and be totally autonomous — but that doesn’t mean just that it can move. There is so much hiding in that boat that allows everything from exploring to underwater archeology, and these things are really complex to include in a boat that primarily is a very nice place to be. Very nice interior, very nice and pleasant spaces — and behind that, it’s hiding all these functions.”

When it comes to the interior vision, Nuvolari Lenard’s approach is rooted in celebrating the owner’s individual aesthetic and interests.  

“ What you do is you maximize the dream of the owner,” Lenard says. “I often say that we are paid to start dreaming from the point that the owner cannot dream anymore. We are expanding that dream into the next level.”

Beyond that, “The common factor of all of [these interiors] is really quality and attention to detail,” says Lenard, citing the level of quality as best-of-best of any field. “There’s no hotel built like a super yacht, and quite frankly, I don’t think even any private home has ever used the budgets that we use to build these interiors.”

Which isn’t to say that there’s no budget.

Big Design, Small Margins

”Budgets are huge, but they are limited,” Lenard says. “We have to really always work within the budget, even if the budget seems really almost infinite. The expectations and the requirements for the quality are so high that suddenly these budgets very soon appear to be restrictive.”

Lenard describes each bespoke boat as an artisan product, the collective work of many collaborators. “There is no industry in building a superyacht. Everything is going down to a man with two hands,” he says. 

“Honestly, you have to know that nobody really makes big bucks on designing or building mega yachts. The margins are very small. The majority of that budget goes into materials and into payrolls,” Lenard adds.

“What I like to say is that building a superyacht is probably the biggest injection of private money into the middle class,” he continues. “We are distributing this money between the people, between thousands of people that are building it.” 

Building a Branded Boat

The work of building a fully custom yacht takes time, and not all clients are in the market of waiting. Confronted with the limitations of time and money in a difficult custom market for midsize superyachts, brands and designers are dreaming up semi-custom designs.

Nuvolari Lenard recently unveiled a branded design line, starting with a 52-meter model, in partnership with the Turkish MengiYay shipyard, an approach that leverages the totality of the studio’s design experience. “And then you design each yacht a little bit with the owner to customize it,” Lenard says. “These clients actually go through the same process as if they were building a 100-plus-meter yacht with us. Although the boat is delivered in two, rather than four, years.”

An Interior Approach for an Ever-changing View

New York design firm Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture, which has worked on luxury projects including retail boutiques for Tod’s, the Audemars Piguet House and Pace Gallery, expanded into the yacht interior design space through a collaboration with Italian shipbuilder Benetti. While yacht design only represents a small portion of the business, it’s becoming bigger. 

The team is working on the 32nd order of their 40-meter “Oasis” model, a semi-custom design that can accommodate different levels of design adjustments. There’s also a 34-meter version of the boat, and a new explorer series, the B.Yond available as 40-meter and 57-meter boats, launched last year. Another new line will debut at the Monaco Yacht Show later this year. 

Common requests for the semi-custom line include material modifications, like switching a marble or stone choice, along with layout tweaks like moving room placement, or adding accessibility accommodations like elevators. 

“Although we never designed boats, we had clients who chartered boats regularly, and we got feedback from them,” Bonetti says. “ It’s a vehicle. It’s not a house, it’s not an apartment — it’s something that moves. And so it shouldn’t necessarily mimic an apartment,” he adds. “When we design a house, we know where the sun is and we know where the views are.  This changes all the time [on a boat].”  

The studio took a wellness-forward approach to their design, wanting to highlight the connection to water by creating an organic sense of flow between the outdoor and indoor areas, utilizing the same inside and out to create a gentle progression between spaces.

“The same teak that is outside on the deck, we brought it inside,” Bonetti says. “We worked on how the light that comes into the space and materials gets progressively softer as you get into your own private areas, like the owner’s suite. Everything is organic.”

Bringing in Outside Inspiration

French designer Jacques Pierrejean looks to nature for inspiration — and on a boat, inspiration is never far away. “Our intention is to reflect something that we can find close to us when we are outside or close to the sea,” Pierrejean says. “ Because for me it is not a boundary between the exterior or the interior. If you are inside of the yacht, you can feel outside.”

The way that the waves break onto the beach might inspire a carpet, or the reflection of the sun on the water might inform placement of gold leaf on an interior wall to cast light inside a room. He’s created a carpet to give the impression of grass, and added a small garden to accommodate the comfort of canine companions onboard.

Pierrejean’s curved exterior design for Yas, a 141-meter boat currently owned by an Emirati royal, was inspired by the body of a dolphin. The boat, a refit of a former Dutch navy frigate, was rebuilt by ADM Shipyards in the UAE and its superstructure features large panes of glass. “ Most of the time we are looking to design something which is not on the market,” Pierrejean says. “People have to dream with you, and you have to convince them to dream with you.”

Six-star Service at Sea

“If you can dream it up and make it buildable, you can create all kinds of things,” says Jonathan Quinn Barnett, who began his career in Europe working with yacht designers Ron Holland and Jon Bannenberg. The accumulation of wealth in the ’70s and ’80s brought clients who were increasingly requesting luxury additions outside the scope of naval architects, paving the path for a class of yacht designers who could marry technical and aesthetic engineering. Moving to Seattle in the early ’90s, Barnett was well-positioned for the area’s tech boom, establishing himself as an American designer with European flair. 

Onboard amenities have expanded to include elevators, full-service spas, theaters, underwater observation areas, and practically any other specialized use case that can be imagined. 

 ”You’re building the ultimate off-grid six star hotel,” says Barnett, whose approach to interiors is rooted in designing intimate spaces that feel personal and connected to the surroundings. “You have to have doors that open and to allow you to live on deck,” Barnett says. “And that’s where the joy of being at sea is: really being out in the elements and interacting with the ocean.”

Barnett worked with Paul Allen to design the interiors of his 126-meter Octopus, which launched in 2003 and has served as an expedition vessel, traveling to climates as remote as Antarctica. The boat also featured a music recording studio, used by U2 and Mick Jagger, among others.

The Art of Being on the Boat

Barnett collaborated with Klara and Larry Silverstein’s “Silver Shalis” motoryacht, incorporating the couple’s collection of glass art; another recent project for a client included the installation of a James Turrell light art piece. 

While Barnett primarily works on yacht projects for individuals, he was tasked by Washington-based corporation Boeing to design the interiors for the company’s private yacht, Daedalus, built by Seattle-based shipmaker Delta Marine in the late ’90s. Barnett had photographs from the company’s archive, documenting the internal structure of the wings of a 1930s China Clipper flying boat, blown up and displayed as artwork.

“The interior is both a luxury space, but it also forms a gallery; a place for them to show off some of these pieces,” Barnett says. “The artwork that I’ve had the opportunity to work with is just mind blowing, as you’d see in any museum, and sometimes even rarer.”

Barnett recently designed a semi-custom 42-meter yacht concept with Taiwanese yacht-maker Horizon, which can deliver a boat in around a year depending on customization. “I challenge the shipyard so that my clients’ yacht doesn’t look like the one parked right next to it,” he adds. “If you’re gonna spend $150 million, you don’t want a yacht that looks just like the one that came out a year before.”

“Perfect” is the word that Barnett lands on when describing a well-built and well-designed motor yacht. “It doesn’t matter if it’s ten feet or a hundred meters,” he says. “There’s something about a boat that’s so well cared for and so beautifully manufactured.”