What dreams look like. It’s one of these topics that pop up frequently amongst creatives, and just last week we stumbled over an interesting article when Superyacht Design asked various people from different areas of the industry the question: Do we, as designers, have the responsibility to ‘promote the industry to a wider market?’

Basically, what it boils down to is speculative work. “Creativity is something you can’t switch off” explains Christian Leyk, “I don’t have to wait to be asked to design something. The ideas pop up in your head and it’s the designer’s natural instinct to take a note or doodle something. It would feel wrong to me to ignore those ideas, and it would feel wrong to hide them in the drawer.”

On the other hand we are of course professionals, and as much as we enjoy what we’re doing, we are in the business to make a living. Spending a few hours or days or even longer on an illustration or a 3D rendering without somebody paying for it usually does not pay the bills, and we already do it frequently when we put together proposals for potential clients. It might not look like that from the outside, but yachts are a highly competitive market…

It’s therefore understandable that many design studios don’t want to spend their resources on doing speculative work. Some of us might even want to focus their creativity on totally unrelated topics in their free time, such as cooking or gardening. There are, of course, good reasons to sit down and just draw something because you feel like it… First of all there is that freedom to actually design something without any limitations other than the ones you set yourself. You choose the length. The number of decks. Maybe even the number of hulls. You can play with shapes never seen before on a yacht. You can even choose to ignore the laws of physics (that’s quite liberating sometimes!) Or you set yourself a particular challenge by setting certain parameters.

“For instance, you might say there’s a market for an elegant, fairly low volume 130 metre motor yacht with just 4 decks above waterline. With soft flowing lines, not too radical but equally sufficiently different to stand out from the main stream…”

We see ourselves as ‘professional dreamers’, and we believe that as such, designers should inspire clients and show them more possibilities other than the ones that are ‘already out there’. And while doing so, we might actually invite people who never thought about yachts to maybe dream of building one. Maybe there are people who just didn’t consider yachts because the ones they see in Monaco or in the Caribbeans simply didn’t inspire them? “Not everybody grew up on the family’s schooner, spending the weekends on the water. Some of us didn’t discover the ocean until much later. Some people think that yachts are just flashy status symbols. We believe there’s more to yachts. If we don’t show them new dreams, who does?”