5 Minutes With Fiona Diamond

Press  ·  Mayfair Magazine, Luxury London  ·  June 2017

5 Minutes With Fiona Diamond

Mayfair magazine’s regular quickfire profile, 5 Minutes With, turned its attention to Fiona Diamond, founder of yacht design and project management company Seymour Diamond, for a personal take on the woman behind the studio.

Getting to Know Fiona

Fiona was born in Madrid and spent her childhood moving between Sweden, Holland and finally the UK, where her family settled when she was twelve, a pattern she puts down to her father’s career at Shell and the source of her lifelong love of travel. Her first proper job was at Asprey, in the antique silver department in the heart of Mayfair, not far from where Seymour Diamond is based today.

She traces her creative instincts to a love of maths and pattern, and describes her design process as being like packing a suitcase: fitting an owner’s wishes and a crew’s practical needs into a single, workable space. Her inspiration comes from nature and from Gaudí, and on one memorable project she had real grass turfed onto the aft deck of a seventy metre motor yacht so the owner’s dog could have a proper garden at sea.

Away from the drawing board, Fiona keeps a low-key list of London and Mayfair haunts, from Wild Honey and The Square to Sexy Fish and a quick Crussh when she is short on time, and admits to a guilty pleasure for mini pork pies. September, she says, means the Monaco Yacht Show, where good business and good parties tend to arrive in equal measure.

It is a rare, informal glimpse of the person behind three decades of yacht design, the curiosity, the eye for detail and the love of travel that still shape every Seymour Diamond project today.

More About Fiona