CRAFTMAN’S VISION

42, from Rome, he is considered the enfant prodige of yacht design. It's no coincidence: he graduated with honors in Industrial Design at 22, but landed his first consulting job at just 18. In 2011 he began working with major shipyards after founding his own firm, which today has a seasoned team based in Rome - though his résumé also includes collaborations with Zuccon International Project and with Andrea Vallicelli's studio. Among the yachts bearing his signature are award-winning superyachts like Spectre, Calex, Triumph, Zazou, Kasper 7, and the explorer yacht Tremenda. We met him in Milan and took the opportunity to talk - about boats, design, and his projects, naturally.

Cigarette also means speed...

It does mean speed, yes.

What's the relationship with speed in the contemporary yachting world?

It's a love you can't really talk about too much, in the sense that the most precious asset for our clients remains time, and speed is obviously a tool for saving it or making the most of it, depending on the context. It clearly comes with issues of energy consumption and environmental sustainability - not so much on boats like the Cigarette, but on larger yachts. Still, it's a subject where, all things considered, no owner really turns down the chance to indulge their fantasies. It depends a lot on the market segment and the client's geographic background.

You like to describe yourself as an engineer-designer rather than just a designer. Why?

Actually, one word is just the translation of the other. The problem is that in Italy, "designer" has taken on a somewhat diminished connotation, mistakenly translated as "stylist." A designer isn't someone who deals only with style, "engineer-designer" meaning someone who plans and engineers the whole project, is the correct translation. It's someone with a global vision of the project they're working on, a different professional role from someone who thinks only about aesthetics.

So it's really about managing a whole process?

It's about managing a process. It's the vision of how all the components of a project fit together. I like to say that designing boats isn't difficult, it's complex, because of the natural complexity of this type of project. The designer is the one who manages that complexity, who knows how to make a whole set of criteria work together.

In this field, I think there are three relationships worth examining: designer-owner, designer-shipyard, and sometimes designer-market. How do you navigate between these three dimensions?

I really love that question. I'll quote Giulio Carlo Argan, if I'm not mistaken, who said that the product is always a synthesis of cultures, between designer and end client, between designer and builder, and sometimes the end client coincides with the market itself.

Great works are born from clients.

They're born from a shared sense of purpose, where there's real humility, not performed humility, in everyone taking a step back to understand the other side. In the case of owners, that's the first step. Imagine someone with virtually unlimited financial resources investing in what you could, at the extreme, call a useless toy, but whose value equals a major financial and professional investment. The only way to convince them you're the right partner is to build an empathetic relationship, one of mutual understanding and trust. And you don't build that over dinner, joking around. You build it by bringing credibility and the ability to listen to the table. It's an exercise every designer always has to do: remembering that what you design has to please the client, not just, or not primarily,yourself. In the B2B relationship with shipyards, the dynamics are different. A relationship with a shipyard favors the designer, because it guarantees professional continuity, a fundamental aspect in yacht design, where, especially with big boats like the ones we build, every project is its own standalone episode, with no guarantee another one is coming. To make it work, we try to be reliable partners: excellent execution, transparency, clarity of intent, the ability to explain ourselves well even when there's conflict. The market is perhaps the hardest relationship to pin down, because boating doesn't generate statistically significant numbers. Reading it is often more a feeling, an instinct that develops after years, or decades, in the profession, with the hope of getting it right. I'd add that boating is, by its nature, a very conservative world: a client spends a great deal on an object with a very specific use, so they're often scared of taking risks, especially the end client, while the shipyard perhaps feels a bit freer. That's clearly a limitation for the designer, but it can also be a great opportunity: by finding the right balance between pushing forward and reassuring the client, you can achieve tremendous success, precisely because in this context it's easier to be innovative.

With that in mind, where do you see the potential for the boating industry to evolve? Up to now, design has often been more revolutionary than evolutionary. What does the industry need right now?

A lot of people are going to hate me for what I'm about to say, but this is absolutely true for motor yachts. I'd like to see that same push applied to sailboats, where the sense of revolution is a bit more rigid, it drags its feet.

There are aspects of sailboats that have evolved in the wrong direction, at least for anyone who actually knows how to sail them.

You said it, not me! And if you think about it, we talk a lot about sustainability - maybe a little less in the past year - but what's more sustainable, in terms of navigation, than a sailboat? And yet we can't manage to create products capable of attracting new owners, new market segments, probably because they're still perceived as uncomfortable, not well suited to comfortable cruising. That remains a huge space, not yet explored enough, in terms of the industry's potential. That said, it's a very hard question to answer, because boating is so many things: it's the six-and-a-half-meter rubber dinghy, a fantastic tool for a family, and it's the 150-meter yacht. Speaking about the boats we design, on average between 30 and 80 meters, there's a strong trend, one we hope we've anticipated and pushed forward a bit in recent years, toward greater attention to proxemics on board: boats that speak a more familiar language to their owners, that make them feel more at home. Not in the sense of copying the style of their apartment, but in the sense of being less hostile environments to move through, while still remaining seaworthy, safe, capable of proper navigation, because after all they're moving through a hostile and dangerous environment - but with an architectural, stylistic, and ergonomic quality that invites the pleasure of the journey, as an extension of the pleasure people build into their everyday lives: the home, the garden.

Is that also, in a sense, a rediscovery of comfort?

Yes, I'd happily go that far. The technological advances of recent years applied to large yachts have helped a lot in that respect: I'm thinking of window openings that were unthinkable just 10 to 15 years ago, or advances in structural design that have allowed for larger openings, hatches, thresholds with no steps between outdoor and indoor spaces. It sounds like a small thing, but for a great many people it's almost a deal breaker, I once had a boat go unsold precisely because of a detail like that, tied to the old hull platform it was built on. Technology and computing are also a big help in managing comfort on board. On that front, though, home automation on boats is still pretty primitive compared to what you can do in a house, which is almost paradoxical, considering how much is invested in onboard entertainment on a large yacht.

If you had to describe your "signature" - what you always want present in a boat - what would you say?

You're putting me on the spot! I want happy owners, that's the truth. We try to achieve that by designing boats that are timeless, not old, there's a big difference. We're not trying to be fashionable, but to find harmony, from an aesthetic standpoint, with proportions that are as universal as possible. Design, and styling in particular, obviously remains something very subjective in how it's perceived, but we're always looking for cleanliness, a refinement in how surfaces move through space, in the proportions between voids and solids. The other thing I'm really trying to bring into our projects, especially in the interiors but increasingly in the exteriors too, is a certain celebration of the value of finishes that comes not from the monetary value of the materials, but from the craftsmanship that shapes them. I find it far more fascinating for a woven leather detail on board to be perceived as precious because there's only one craftsman, in one specific place, capable of making it after thirty years of study, rather than because we went and "stole" a stone that had been sleeping 20 million years underground. I think it's a certain return to the love of craftsmanship that Italy, in particular, knows how to express - a feeling that's fairly widespread, and one we're trying to give real weight to. I think it's also part of the very perception of luxury: what could be more beautiful than being able to afford the work and mastery of so many people building, just for you, a small masterpiece? To quote an old mentor of mine, Gianni Zuccon: "the contemporary equivalent of a Renaissance palazzo."

A question about education: how much value is there, today, in training the young people who will enter this industry?

If we want to still exist as an industry in 10 years - not 50 - the primary goal has to be constantly improving the training of young people. Boating needs highly competent professionals: the product is becoming increasingly complex, clients are increasingly demanding, and professionals need to be up to that challenge. The industry also has to be able to support its professionals financially - that's been a major problem for years, both in the Italian supply chain and worldwide. On the other hand, there's also a role for the public sector: training needs to keep getting better and be more oriented toward making these professionals immediately useful in the workforce, because in such a highly professionalized environment, you can't afford to have people spend five or six years in the pipeline before they're actually ready.

To close: is it fair to say that boating is one of the great ambassadors of Made in Italy around the world?

Absolutely, without question. More than 50% of the superyachts, boats over 24 meters, built in the world are born in Italy. But I'd go further: boating is a healthy, virtuous economy that takes enormous amounts of capital, which would otherwise sit idle somewhere producing nothing, and distributes it along a supply chain of extremely high-value professionals and craftspeople. I'm not saying they'd disappear without boating, but they certainly wouldn't live with the same peace of mind. So it's not just an ambassador of Made in Italy around the world, it's also an exceptional pillar of support for the country's economy and for preserving a body of knowledge that belongs to us.