The trend of yachting is fast catching up in India. A few years back luxury wheels made their presence felt when the biggest brands rolled out onto the streets of Indian cities. But the ultimate status symbol goes far beyond the roads and rules the high seas! Luxury Yachts – exceptionally expensive, privately owned marine vessels used for recreation and professionally crewed are steadily crowding the Mumbai harbor and holiday destinations like Goa and Kerala on India’s west coast. To acquire such an item remains as much as a lifestyle choice as it is a testament to wealth. It is therefore not surprising that luxury car makers like Bugatti, Porsche and Lamborghini have explored this high-luxury territory and collaborated with naval architects, designers and yacht manufacturers to build that which is exclusive and futuristic. While one may find the best yacht brands in India, Concept Yachts go one step further in establishing themselves as extraordinary! Concept yachts are all about custom fabrication, experimenting with different manufacturing processes and materials and turning innovation to reality! Presenting the ultimate in luxury – concept yachts, for those who not only dream big but dream phenomenal!
We bring you our selection of concept yachts:
The Poseidon 180 : A walk in the Sea!
The Poseidon 180 from Giancarlo Zema Design Group is being developed by Bugatti yachts. This 55 metre motoryacht is particularly innovative in its courageous unusual architecture in the effort to create the experience of ‘a walk in the sea’. The luxurious yacht comes fitted with floating decks under a giant glass dome. There are eight staterooms that enrich you with the floor to ceiling panoramic ocean views. The Poseidon 180 is power driven by Bugatti Marine engines and can go at speeds of up to 40 knots. The 180-foot superyacht touts a military developed Bentley Yachts’ air cavity hull and a pioneering hull design which reduces hydrodynamic drag, giving you 30 percent better fuel efficiency. The makers also claim this will make seasickness a thing of the past.
The Poseidon 180 also features Bentley Marine mini turbine CHPC (Combined Heat, Power and Cooling) generators, that provide power on demand not only to the 360º steerable water jets, but also to everything else onboard. The CHPC system provides hot water and air conditioning for the whole vessel without the need of compressors or any moving parts. A computer controls the load of the gensets at all times and even turn them on and off as required. Lightweight next generation energy storage devices with high output power and fast recycle times, complete eliminate the use of batteries.
At a whooping 50 million dollar price tag Poseidon 180 is still a glint in its designers’ eyes but, given the spending power of the New Rich, it won’t be long before one of these is bobbing up and down in the oceans.
WHY: The Moving Island
The starting point of WHY is based on everybody’s desire to own an Island: a place to live in complete freedom, with no constraint and with commendable independence. A real estate with a beautiful villa would partly fulfill this aspiration. A yacht offers the freedom to move but does not have the space of a property. Now imagine a combination of the above! Why, WHY has it all! Space, stability, movement, independence, peace, WHY is your privately owned moving island.
WHY Wally-Hermès Yachts is created by french luxury brand Hermès and Monaco based yacht maker Wally. What’s unique about this concept yacht is that it offers a new way of life on the sea whilst caring, protecting and loving it. While most yachts would leave a brow raising carbon footprint, WHY is developed with the latest and most advanced technologies of sustainable energy. The architecture of the whole project is perfectly integrated in the environment with no excesses, nothing is superfluous, and the impact on the sea is minimum. The fundamental credo of WHY is ’form-equals-function’. It’s interiors are generously flooded with natural light, there are photovoltaic panels on the glass along the hull side as well as on the glass roof opening, like Venetian blinds, a forward end swimming pool, and a huge aft deck beach.
WHY 58×38 features four decks offering almost 4,000 sqm of guest area and accommodation up to 16 guests and 24 crew. WHY 37×24 has three decks providing 1,000 sqm living area and accommodates up to 10 guests and 15 crew. The sustainability also results from the revolutionary design of WHY: the exceptional volumes offered by the very large beam allow installing onboard all the sustainable energy systems that take up a lot of room. For this, the function and the form of WHY are strictly related. The five main features of WHY’s sustainability are: thermal insulation, energy management. Energy recovery, solar energy and energy storage. They all are known and proven technologies. The originality of this project is to have integrated them all together.
Porsche RFF135 Catamaran Yacht: Functional. Timeless. Purist.
Porsche is bringing its car making expertise onto the water. The RFF 135 by Porsche Design is crafted for the new generation yacht owner. Her unique, space-aged, contemporary design makes her unmistakably a piece of modern architecture. The design’s main focus is to indulge the customer with unmatched performance, comfort, space and luxury that suits a high-end
lifestyle. The RFF 135 is the first joint project by the Porsche Design Group and Singapore- based mega yacht builder Royal Falcon Fleet. It is a luxurious anomaly on the water: a power catamaran with a length of more than 40 metres.
The appearance of the RFF135 is particularly extraordinary, as it was conceived as a “spacecraft on the water,” as was requested by the customer. In this form, the catamaran platform offers completely new possibilities for configuration in exterior and interior design. Unlike a great number of mega-yachts, the interior was styled in a highly modern way and captures the
dynamic contours of the hull. Luxurious and functional, it is unadorned in design. Authentic, premium and comfortable materials constitute the interior. The generous impact of space goes beyond established standards of a 135-foot (41.2 metre) yacht. With 472 square meters of space inside, the vessel accommodates ten passengers and the same number of crew. The yacht is equipped with twin V16 turbo diesel engines from German manufacturer MTU which propel the craft to a top speed of around 35 knots, allowing it to travel upto 2,000 nautical miles on one tank of fuel. It is designed ‘in keeping with the
functional, timeless and purist hand’ of Porsche!