Sailboat builders make design waves

Advanced Yachts and Italia Yachts delivering dream boats

Genoa - Strolling along the pontoons of the sailboat area at the Genoa Boat Show, held October 1-6, two Italian boatyards caught the eye: Advanced Yachts and Italia Yachts, their latest models floating one right next to the other. The boats are beautiful, with sleek, fast designs. Their decks are covered in teak and have ample outdoor areas for relaxing and soaking up the sun. Both the models on exhibit, Advanced Yacht's new A44 and Italia Yacht's new 15.98 (which debuted in Genoa) are candidates for the 2015 European Boat of the Year award; Italia Yachts' 13.98 already won the prestigious award in the luxury yachts category in 2013. What is striking about the two builders is that they are small and (relatively) new, being only four years old each. Both builders are clearly aiming for the high end of the market, sparing no costs and putting only the best of "made in Italy" into their yachts.

Advanced Yachts was founded by Antonella Di Leo and her husband (who is also her business partner), when they decided they wanted to move their family to the coast, away from smoggy Milan. They set their sights high: both experienced sailors, they wanted to build "very light and performing boats with comfortable, design-focused interiors," Di Leo told Ansa. The company, born during the hard years of the financial crisis, managed to recruit some of the sailing world's top design talent, including from top boatyard Wally, and launched its first model, the A66, at the Genoa show in 2010; the A80 followed a couple of years later, in 2012.

The A44 (the number refers to the boat's length in feet) has "very contained operating costs," Di Leo said. With its light materials and innovative design, it is both fast and comfortable. Boats aside, Di Leo said the company also offers its customers an innovative winter storage and management service, looking after the boat when it's not in use. Its regatta-prep service assembles teams and brings boats to whatever regatta course their time-challenged owners want; all the owners have to do is board their boats and race.

The company - which is based in Mandolfo, about 40 km southeast of San Marino, on Italy's Adriatic coast - plans to launch an 80-footer next spring and it already has a couple of potential customers asking it to develop a 90-100 foot behemoth.

All its boats have been sold abroad, with buyers in Hong Kong, Russia, Germany and Monaco, and the company is looking to find a dealer in Miami, where it will participate at the next Miami Boat Show, in February. "Our aim is to turn this into a big business, maybe even through acquisitions," Di Leo said.

While Italia Yachts' story is different, it, too, was founded by experienced sailors who wanted "to create something really new," as Matteo Polli, the company's chief yacht designer, told ANSA. The three founding partners, all experienced sailors who had worked for 15 years as sales agents in Italy for Denmark's X-Yachts, decided they wanted to set out on their own. Over the years, the partners had collected many suggestions from customers as to what would make an "ideal boat", co-owner and project manager Franco Corazza told ANSA, and so they decided to give it a shot. "We're a new shipyard, with old people," Corazza jokes.

The company's first model, the 10.98 (which refers to the boat's length in meters), was a success and was followed by the 13.98 (which won the Boat of the Year award). The new 15.98 will be followed by a "small" racing-cruiser, the 9.98, and - sometime in the middle of next year - the 12.98.

Aside from the barrage of model launches, Italia Yachts - based in Chioggia, near Venice - immediately looked to foreign markets for customers; the firm's boats are already sailing in France, England, Germany and Holland. Northern Europe, the US and China are in the firm's sights.

Asked what the firm sees as the secret to its success, Corazza answers: "having made tradition current" by, for example, taking cues from the more "feminine shapes" of boats from the 1980s but building them with the latest in hi-tech materials and techniques.