Azimut Seadeck 9 assessment: a gleaming flagship yacht

Azimut Yachts, the Italian luxurious motor yacht model, has simply unveiled Seadeck 9, the most important yacht ever to roll out of its Avigliana shipyard and the brand new, gleaming flagship of a sequence that’s quietly rewriting what luxurious at sea is meant to seem like. The scale makes headlines. The credit are the actual story.

For the interiors, Azimut skipped the yacht-design institution completely – no ateliers steeped in gold leaf and gangway glamour – and as a substitute employed Matteo Thun and Antonio Rodriguez, the Milan-based structure studio behind the beloved Vigilius Mountain Resort and 20 years of hospitality and healthcare tasks constructed on a devotion to materials longevity and unshowy sustainability. Neither had designed a lot as a dinghy’s cabin earlier than this fee. Daring transfer. It paid off.

The absence of yacht-design conference reveals the second you step aboard. Seadeck 9’s defining flourish is a 180-degree pool deck and a run of cascading terraces that pull the pool stage with the waterline, dissolving the standard hierarchy of a superyacht, wherein the higher decks carry out for visitors whereas the decrease decks quietly, invisibly, serve them. Right here, all the pieces simply flows downhill towards the water, just like the boat forgot it was presupposed to be exhibiting off.

‘When Alberto Mancini began designing Seadeck, he had a quite simple concept,’ says Giovanna Vitelli, Chair of Azimut|Benetti, of the yacht’s naval architect. ‘If you cannot comprise the ocean, then you definately turn into a part of it. The 180° Pool Deck, the cascading terraces and the pool flush with the deck – all the pieces flows naturally, taking you from the water straight into the center of the yacht.’

Vitelli has overseen Azimut’s product growth and R&D since 2004 and have become Chair in 2023. It was her push towards exterior architects, a break from her father Paolo Vitelli’s five-decade in-house mannequin, that opened the door to briefs like this one.

Supplies carry the identical logic by way of the inside, and there is poetry within the specifics. Palettes run in sand and cream tones meant to blur the road between deck and horizon, so that you’re by no means fairly positive the place the boat ends and the Mediterranean begins.

The carpet underfoot – smooth, unassuming, straightforward to overlook – is woven from yarn recovered from discarded fishing nets. ‘It is a small element,’ Vitelli says, ‘however it says so much concerning the pondering behind the entire undertaking.’ Fairly. Thun and Rodriguez specified recycled or recyclable supplies wherever the transient allowed, treating sustainability much less as a checkbox than as a texture.

Seadeck 9 additionally marks Azimut’s first hybrid manufacturing sequence, constructed on a carbon-fibre hull for weight financial savings that interprets immediately into gasoline effectivity. Moderately than let ‘sustainable’ keep a advertising phrase, Azimut is now benchmarking its boats in opposition to the SEA Index and YETI scores, third-party instruments that give house owners, brokers and insurers a comparable effectivity determine as a substitute of a declare.

‘I usually discuss light know-how,’ Vitelli says. ‘Expertise should not dominate the expertise. It ought to work quietly within the background, permitting individuals to benefit from the sea with out distraction. Hull effectivity, hybrid propulsion and light-weight carbon-fibre development – none of those improvements is there merely to impress. They don’t seem to be about pace; they’re about delivering extra consolation, extra silence, higher effectivity and, finally, extra freedom.’

That precept extends to Resort Mode, which lets house owners drop anchor for hours with the turbines switched off completely – no hum, no diesel odor, nothing however the boat, the celebrities and the water, doing its shimmering factor.

‘For me, the final word luxurious is silence,’ Vitelli says. ‘When all the pieces turns into quiet, you are feeling fully at one with the ocean.’ It is the form of line that might sound like brochure copy from anybody else. From her, standing in entrance of the boat, it does not.

She reaches, unexpectedly, for a lyric to elucidate the place she thinks luxurious is headed. ‘There’s an previous Italian track referred to as Sapore di sale. Each Italian is aware of it. It is concerning the feeling of salt in your pores and skin after a swim, mendacity within the solar with somebody you like. I believe that is the place luxurious goes. It is now not about exhibiting off – it is about moments like that.’

Behind the launch, moderately charmingly, is a €50 million funding in increasing the Avigliana shipyard, which sits within the foothills of the Alps, nowhere close to the water the boats it produces are destined for.

‘I all the time discover it fairly particular that we design and construct yachts within the mountains for a life at sea,’ Vitelli says. ‘Seadeck 9 is an funding not solely in our amenities, however sooner or later route of the corporate.’