Winners of the Boat International Design Challenge 2018

Press  ·  Boat International, The Design Issue  ·  May 2018

Winners of the Boat International Design Challenge 2018

Every year, Boat International’s Superyacht Design Symposium hands a room full of the world’s leading designers and builders one hour, one fictional client and one very real vessel to reimagine. In 2018, Fiona Diamond’s team went home with first place.

The Brief: A Ready-Made Adventurer

This year’s imaginary client was a forty-five-year-old American, the major shareholder in an electronics business built on Texan oil money. A committed charterer of adventurous yachts, he had just bought Ryan Chouest, a sixty-seven metre offshore supply vessel, for five million dollars, with a further thirty million to refit her into a full-scale superyacht able to earn around eight hundred thousand dollars a week on the charter market. He wanted room for zip-lining, rock climbing, skeet shooting and archaeological digs, a research space for his pet project of scientific missions by submarine, and, since he flew his two Czech Shepherds everywhere with him, a boat the dogs would love as much as he did.

Sea Ranch: First Place

Fiona’s team, Sea Ranch, brought together Steve Gresham, Tim Gosling, Mark Tucker, Stefano Vafiadis and Glyn Hutchinson. Their design leaned hard into the brief’s environmental requirements, with diesel-electric propulsion, a photovoltaic helipad, exhaust scrubbers on every power plant and a wind turbine to help cut generator use. For the owner’s sporting side, they added a baseball batting cage and a trampoline, and for the Texan in him, an outdoor cinema deck nicknamed Lucky Star, complete with fire pit and teppanyaki bar. A ski boat, an ATV and a Triton submersible rounded out the toy list.

Judged by a panel of young superyacht owners, Sea Ranch was singled out for how completely it answered the brief, with particular praise for the solar-capturing helipad and the onboard wind generator. Steve Gresham later explained the thinking simply: solar cells on top mean the hotel loads are covered without needing to run the generators all the time.

It’s a fast, high-pressure format, but one that mirrors real design work more than it might seem: an unusual brief, a tight timeline and a client whose wish list has to become a workable, buildable yacht.

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