Reconfiguring the yacht/water interface

I’m a keen sailor, and I was fortunate enough to begin serious sailing in big, semi-professional offshore racing, so I’m greatly appreciative of good boat design. But my perspective isn’t about handling and functionality, because my skills are limited and I’m basically just “rail meat”.

But I do look at boats – a lot – with eyes substantially bigger than my wallet. And underneath all the expensive sleekness and gizmos, it’s unfortunately a fairly uninspiring vista. Admittedly, there’s constantly better and constantly more capable, with new materials and with upwardly mobile comfort, facilities and features. As with so much else, yesterday’s luxury features are today’s standard equipment. But almost all the designs on offer to us mere mortals are just tweaks, variations and improvements on a very limited number of themes, both in design and technology.

There are indeed advanced tech features out there, like daggerboard elevators, canting keels and Beneteau’s new-for-ordinary-boats Wingsail rig, but none of these have yet percolated down to the mainstream market.

Yacht design inside-out

So I was intrigued to come across the eye-catching design work of NYC-based Lujac Desautel, who opens up beguiling new perspectives on yacht design. And, in particular, on experiencing nature when you’re out there.

The interesting thing about Desautel’s SALT 55-metre superyacht concept (shown above – be sure to click through the almost-hidden presentation!) is not so much whether one “likes” it (or would be able to afford it), but the radical rethink of the whole boat perspective and yacht/water interface. SALTis a ketch design with fully battened wing-style square sails on its twin masts. More importantly, it provides a remarkable re-orientation from a boat as a structure that’s fundamentally closed off against the outside world … with windows as a minimum feature for light to come in, rather than for you to see out.

When conventional designs are not sailing, the occupants’ sitting position, views and point of visual reference are always inward-looking – both in the cockpit and down below. You rarely ever really look at the water – you’resailing forwards, you’re inside and up above the water (especially in big boats), with all seating positions traditionally angled inwards. And when moored there’s hardly any visual connection or practical access to the water, unless your boat is new or expensive enough to have one of the most popular recent features – a boat platform. It’s almost ludicrous that the one thing we never do when moored up – whether on a buoy, at anchor or in harbour – is to look at the water that’s pivotal for the whole boat experience.

Enclosed or open, on it or in it

In the SALT design, the hull sides and even the underside of the stern are “de-constructed” and can be opened up for close contact and immersion, with dramatic fold-out terraces and staircases that lead into the sea. Suspended between the two ketch-rigged masts, which bear fully battened wing-style square sails, is the owner’s quarters consisting of what resembles a spectacular glass-sided box.  The whole superstructure is oriented for looking outwards instead of the traditional inwards. You’re in nature, rather than on it.

Wonderful and enticing though it may be, the design is, of course, hugely impractical. No one in Denmark could afford it, and it probably couldn’t even get into most Baltic harbours. The under-the-skin tech requirements would be colossal (tho’ eminently doable) and despite all the electronics and automation you’d need a big/expensive crew.

But Desautel is a designer, not a yacht designer, and thus unencumbered by conventional thinking. His fundamental agenda is about the interaction of people, space and nature, whether in buildings or boats. “My approach to art, architecture and design is that it should invite one to experience the world in a different way,” he writes. He has certainly achieved that, in a powerful set of design studies that may be more beguiling and gobsmacking than practical, but remind us how hide-bound most of the design we put up with really is.

Power of the perhaps possible

Lujac Desautel’s evocative website also speaks volumes about the power and persuasion of computer rendering in presenting ideas never seen before, where the reader/customer/target group doesn’t have a conceptual language or context from which to grasp what the designer is really getting at.

It’s unclear how many of his ideas and projects have made it into the real world, but computers enable him to sketch gorgeous “might have been” realities that are probably more visually skewering than any reality-compromised physical manifestation might turn out to be.