I am standing in a marble-tiled shower that is larger than my bathroom. It has two enormous rain showerheads and space for maybe ten, certainly six, people to comfortably wash at the same time. Even if you want to get sexy in your shower, this is larger than necessary, I suggest to Bas Swanink, who is showing me around. “Well, that depends on your definition of sexy,” he says, raising a mischievous eyebrow.
He is the sales director at Oceanco, a builder of superyachts. And the bathroom he has let me nose about in is not in a house, it is on a boat — a very large boat. Its code name is Y722, a monster of a superyacht, 111m long, the equivalent of about 13 red London buses parked nose to tail. It is in the process of being fitted out — electricians, carpenters and engineers are crawling through hatches, sanding, drilling and buffing various cabins — in a vast Oceanco hangar just south of Rotterdam, before being handed over to its billionaire client, believed to be Gabe Newell.
You may not have heard of Newell, but the American, who made his fortune from video games such as Half-Life, is estimated by Forbes to be worth $9.5 billion and is thought to own more superyachts than anyone else (six, possibly seven). Last month it was announced that Newell likes Oceanco so much that he bought the manufacturer, a favourite of billionaires with deep pockets such as Lakshmi Mittal and Jeff Bezos, whose Koru, built by Oceanco, is a 127m, three-mast yacht, one of the largest sailing boats in the world. “We definitely build the coolest boats,” Swanink says.
But if a billionaire decides to change suppliers, they don’t have far to go to find an alternative. The Netherlands has emerged as the only serious rival to Italy when it comes to the building of superyachts, a definition that is increasingly hard to pin down in an era when as the billionaires’ fortunes get bigger, so too do their yachts. Originally a superyacht was anything more than 24m in length. Now many in the industry define it as any boat longer than 40m. Last year, Italy delivered 55 yachts longer than 40m and the Netherlands 19. No other country delivered more than ten.
“We have built yachts since the 17th century and even before,” says Louis Hamming, the chief executive of Vitters, which specialises in sailing boats, explaining why the Dutch are so good at attracting billionaires in search of a vessel. “So we have that depth of knowledge, which is a big advantage. We have created an infrastructure in Holland, also in Germany — so, if you draw a 200km circle around the shipyard, we can get 95 per cent of all our products which we need to build a boat.”
Italian boats tend to be cheaper, yachts from Turkey — fast emerging as a serious boat builder — cheaper still. A superyacht 65m in length from the Dutch builder Royal Hakvoort costs between €115 million and €120 million, according to Albert Hakvoort, the fourth-generation managing director of Royal Hakvoort. The equivalent Turkish boat costs about €65 million. “But if you buy a Turkish or Italian boat, it drops in value quickly,” he says. “With our boats, they keep their value or even increase it.” Why? He, along with all his fellow countrymen, insists it is Dutch perfectionism that means they deliver high-quality boats, on time and to budget, even if the budget is high. “It’s in our nature to always want to do better. That’s why the Dutch are always complaining,” he smiles, as he takes a puff on his cigarette and shows me around his shipyard, which dominates the pretty small town of Monnickendam, with cobbled streets and a 16th-century church.
The 61m YN253 Project Asia by Hakvoort, which was delivered in 2024
I have come on a tour of some of the Netherlands’ most famous shipyards to find out how they ended up specialising in persuading very rich people to splash cash on floating playthings. Hakvoort’s boatyard, where most of its workers arrive by bicycle, is too small to build anything bigger than about 65m. But as Hakvoort tells me, anything bigger than 45m means you struggle to berth in the shallow waters around the Bahamas. Bigger than 70m and you won’t be able to fit into St Tropez’s harbour. Vessels this size have to anchor out to sea and passengers travel to shore via a tender, stored in the superyacht’s onboard speedboat garage.
Oceanco would not tell me the price of Y722, but it is likely to be somewhere between €350 million and €500 million. That’s because long boats are always far, far larger in volume terms so are exponentially more expensive.
Y722, the 111m Oceanco yacht launched in August
What do you get for such an eye-watering sum? It is more than just the large en suite bathroom attached to the owner’s cabin, 16.5m in width and laid with parquet flooring and incorporating cabinets made of ash, with leather handles. There’s 450km of cabling to control the audiovisual, satellite and air conditioning; a gym for its 24 guests with large picture windows and a separate gym for 38 crew; an 11m by 5m swimming pool, built with wave breakers to ensure the water does not splosh out onto the deck when the boat steams through the Mediterranean; a helipad (of course); a kitchen; a pantry just for the drinks; a cinema; a vast tender garage and a separate “toy garage”, which stores the jet skis, a submarine and spear fishing equipment; a 250 sq m “beach club”, the sunbathing deck that protrudes from the aft of the boat and has become de rigueur on any superyacht. These beach clubs often incorporate a bar, pizza oven, hot tub, wellness spa and diving platforms and allow guests to feel connected to the sea, even though they are travelling on something half the length of the Titanic.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions imposed on the country, a significant number of superyacht customers were shut out from the market. But most Dutch builders say, after an initial panic, the market has continued to climb thanks to America, still able to churn out billionaires. The tariffs imposed by Donald Trump’s White House on European imports do not affect superyachts because most are registered in tax-friendly jurisdictions such as the Cayman Islands or the Bahamas, not the US.
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The cost of large superyachts is so astronomical because of the labour involved, Swanink says. “Seventy per cent of my entire cost base is labour. It’s people and that’s really what makes a difference.” The company employs 350 people directly, but often has as many as 2,000 in total, including subcontractors, working on the six boats it builds at any one time. The layout of the boat, its cabins, gyms, infinity pools, saloons and wine cellars, are nearly always designed by specialist superyacht interior designers, such as Winch Design, based in London, and Malcolm Mckeon, based in Lymington — one of the few yachting specialisms that the UK clings onto.
The other reason Dutch boats are so expensive is that most tend to be bespoke, unlike the Italian or Turkish ones. The owner of Y722 has incorporated an onboard hospital onto his boat. I suggest to Swanink he means a medical room. “No, a real hospital, with oxygen, a scanner, space for a nurse to stay with the patient,” he says.
On top of all this are the support vessels or “shadow yachts”, a second boat many billionaires have chugging alongside their main yacht, housing extra staff, more toys and supplies, freeing up space in their main superyacht. Indeed, it was reported that during the Covid-19 pandemic Newell converted one of his support yachts at the time, the 67.2m Dapple, into a floating hospital so that he never needed to worry about him or his crew getting seriously ill.
There comes a point, surely, when spending such vast sums on such luxury is a little, well, obscene?
It’s a question the builders themselves ask. “Is it ethical to build superyachts for the filthy rich?” says Mark van Heffen, the marketing director at Heesen, a rival to Oceanco and a company that has managed to turn a boat’s helipad into an outdoor cinema. “The answer to that is we have, every day, 1,000 people working for the shipyard, directly or indirectly. So that’s 1,000 families who rely on us. Billionaires can put their money in the bank, but we prefer to have them buy a superyacht with us.”
I suggest to him that this answers a different question — whether the superyacht industry is economically important to the Netherlands, and it clearly is, with some estimates putting its annual contribution to the Dutch economy at about €2.5 billion. But is it ethical for incredibly rich people to be spending so much money on vast aluminium and steel structures? Couldn’t they be spending that money on cancer research or on innovative carbon capture projects? “In some cases they are doing that too,” Swanink says. He adds that superyachts tend to pioneer cutting-edge technology that, eventually, trickles down to the rest of the shipping industry. “Yachting is not that innovative, but our clients make us look for the right alternatives. They are either great entrepreneurs or they are innovators.”
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He points out that Koru, owned by Bezos, like most sail yachts has a diesel engine to allow it to move when there is no wind or when it needs to manoeuvre out of a harbour. But it also has a “hybrid propulsion installation, which allows her to do a full regeneration when she’s under sail”. This involves mini “windmills” under the hull powering up batteries as it glides through the water.
Other green measures that superyacht manufacturers are incorporating include hydrogen-fuel engines or solar-powered batteries. Vitters is constructing something it calls Project Zero, a 69m sailing boat that needs no diesel at all and instead relies on solar panels on the roof of its sundeck to power four huge onboard batteries. “This is extremely ambitious,” Hemming says. But the boat won’t be for everyone. If there’s no wind for the sails, the batteries will only be able to power the engine for 350 miles, compared with the 3,500 miles a standard diesel engine can manage.
The final shipyard I visit is Feadship, probably the main contender to Oceanco’s crown of boat-maker to the uber-wealthy. It made the 101.5m Symphony for Bernard Arnault — the head of luxury goods maker LVMH and, for a while, the world’s richest man — as well as Launchpad, the 118.9m superyacht, for Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Meta. Another of its clients is the American entrepreneur David MacNeil, who made his fortune from something wonderfully mundane: rubber car mats. In one of its building halls is Valor, an 80m boat, in its final hours of being fitted out for a client understood to be MacNeil and designed with ice-breaking capabilities so the owner can “fulfil his ambition of transiting the Northwest Passage and venturing to the most remote parts of the globe”, the company says. The detail that caught my eye was the dedicated deck for the owner’s three golden retrievers, with a dog shower and a grassed area (with drainage) for the dogs to relieve themselves.
Feadship’s Concept C, a 75m superyacht
FEADSHIP
To some people, superyachts are symbols of the worst excesses of late-stage capitalism. To others they are to the 21st century what cathedrals were to medieval Europe — opulent monuments funded by the very wealthy, employing thousands of highly skilled craftsmen and engineers. And, having seen the work involved in the Dutch yards I visited, that argument holds some water.
However, van Heffen at Heesen sums up why many owners splash out. “It’s the ultimate gift for their success in life,” he says. “They like to express that and they like to share that.” Yes, even with their golden retrievers.
