SWEET PEA

On first glance this 44 metre raised pilot house might strike you as just another elegant motor yacht without bringing anything new to the table. You can be forgiven to think that it’s all style over substance and that we sacrificed space or practicality over function. In fact, compared to other yachts of a similar concept you might find the pilot house isn’t as far forward as it could be, so surely the sun deck would be shorter? But wait!

SWEET PEA is actually the result of some longer conversations with knowledgeable people in the industry trying to find the ‘perfect’ answer to the question of how the ‘next yacht up’ from a quintessential Mediterranean ‘Open’ would look like. What kind of vessel would these owners expect when they think of upgrading? What extra value would make them consider the move?

The general consensus was that she’d still be a fast head turner that embodies a certain lifestyle. The Dolce Vita vibe if you want to call it like that. But you’d have to offer more. Like more space for the owner and his and her guests. More air around you when you’re spending more time inside, for example. More reasons to spend more time aboard and maybe the possibility to travel a bit further. Or maybe in the meantime the family grew and now there are kids who want to be entertained?

The trick is to create a yacht that can pull off all of this without suddenly be a ‘big’ yacht. A yacht that has the volume but not the looks of a bus. That’s why SWEET PEA is all about clever packaging and she certainly has a few tricks up her sleeve. For example, there are the stairs from the side deck up on star board but not on portside, so you can walk easily from the foredeck to the aft. You immediately win a lot of interior volume both on the main deck and in the wheelhouse that would otherwise be sacrificed to some symmetry that you won’t even see.

Also, the lines give the yacht a powerful and purposeful appearance and hide the fact that there is quite a bit of interior volume packed into it. And the design of the wing, equipped with all the necessary navigation and communication equipment, does not reduce the size of the sundeck but rather helps with its zoning, so you have places in the sun and places in the shadow.

For the layout we didn’t need to re-invent the wheel. The raised pilot house concept is ideally suited for a yacht of this size as it packages the vertical circulations cleverly around the sunken wheelhouse area. You’ll have the lobby to star board, galley to port. Forward there is a generous owner’s suite while aft we have dining and salon.

On the lower deck we’ll find the guest cabins in the centre and the crew area forward, with direct access to the foredeck. And behind the engine room there is a well-equipped tender garage. As designers we often like to revisit and rethink everything, and we are sometimes a bit disappointed to find out that some things do work so well, you’d better just leave them as they are. We will continue revisiting and reviewing, of course, and rather than making big changes for the sake of it we focus on fine-tuning. And when we find out that that makes a good yacht even better, we’re happy with it.