Smashing The Mold

The owner of the feadship Savannah reaches outside the mainstream to reset the bar on super yacht interior design

- Jill Bobrow

No monolithic white hull and superstructure. No external staircases. No dining table in the main deck salon. No glass elevator dominating the central foyer. No long, straight hotel corridors leading to guest staterooms. Why? Because that’s how Cristina Gherardi Design of Paris, in cooperation with the owner, envisioned things on 274-foot (83.5 meter) Feadship Savannah—a yacht that transcends many design conventions, including being the largest hybrid powered motor yacht launched to date.

Savannah is clad in metallic sea-foam-green paint from the top of her superstructure to her waterline, including her outdoor ceilings and fixed deck furniture. With her “full metal jacket,” according to Feadship, she is the largest object ever to have this metallic coating. The paint job enhances the cohesive, monochromatic profile by Cristina Gherardi Design. The brief also called for a “visually floating” superstructure in stainless steel and teak, and her upper decks appear to be suspended above the hull. Double-thick glass windows that appear black, without being reflective, establish the required uniform dark horizontal lines on each deck. The glass that wraps around each deck seems continuous without window frames. And where there are no windows, 48 custom, glossy, jet-black panels achieve design continuity.

Other design features include extensive use of stainless steel. For instance, the exhaust columns are concealed in monolithic, raked stainless steel columns on the sundeck. They exit the hardtop looking more like sculptures than exhaust funnels.

One reason