There was a moment in superyacht design, somewhere between 2015 and 2022, when the avant-garde appeared to have won. Vertical bows, plumb sterns, glass curtain walls running the full length of a hull, helipads jutting out at angles that suggested architectural ambition more than maritime logic. The biggest deliveries from the German and Dutch yards looked, increasingly, like floating contemporary museums.
The 117-metre Lürssen yacht that departed Bremen this month for Gibraltar is not one of those boats.
The Vessel
Boardwalk — Project 13797 for most of her construction — launched from Lürssen’s Lemwerder facility in December 2025, completed sea trials in the North Sea through the spring, and is now en route to her summer in the Mediterranean. At 117 metres with an 18.6-metre beam and an internal volume of 5,350 gross tonnes, she becomes the 21st largest yacht ever delivered by Lürssen by length, marginally longer than the award-winning 115.1-metre Ahpo. Six decks. Approximately 14 guests. A crew complement of 48.
The exteriors are by Frank Woll, the interiors by Amy Halffman, and the description that recurs in every dispatch from the yard is “classical lines.” This is not marketing language doing the heavy lifting. Boardwalk’s profile genuinely is more 1990s than 2020s — long, low forward sheerline, stepped aft, white-on-white throughout, with the kind of horizontal serenity that used to define large motor yachts before the design language went architectural. The owner, an experienced American shipowner whose previous Boardwalk was a 76.5-metre Feadship, was deeply involved in the styling. The result reads as a deliberate return to a more restrained tradition.
The amenities sit comfortably within that idiom. Two helipads — one certified, on a forward guest-deck position — large enough to accommodate the owner’s Airbus H130. A sizeable beach club aft. A swimming pool with adjoining Jacuzzi set flush into the main aft deck. Approximately 3,000 points of exterior lighting, which the yard notes is roughly a third more than is conventional for a yacht of this scale. Even her corridors, Lürssen has said, were “stretched” to give a sense of volume that does not announce itself.
The one mechanical novelty — and Lürssen does not lay claim to many — is a retractable section installed over the stairwell connecting the main deck to the beach club. When closed, the section is hermetically sealed and class-approved as a structural plate; when open, the upper steps deploy automatically. It is the kind of detail that solves an old problem (the awkward visual interruption of a deck stairwell) with quiet engineering rather than display.
Why the Design Choice Matters
There is a broader argument that Boardwalk makes, beyond her specifics. The yacht market in 2025 was the strongest it has been since the post-pandemic boom — global superyacht sales surged 70% to roughly $8.5 billion according to Knight Frank’s Wealth Report, with sales of vessels over 70 metres jumping 60% year-on-year. American buyers drove up to half of all transactions. In a market that hot, what gets built tells you something about how UHNW taste is moving.
What Boardwalk suggests is a quiet shift back toward proportion. The most ambitious yachts of the late 2010s were architectural set pieces — Sailing Yacht A, the more sculptural Oceanco builds, the latest 100-metre-plus Feadships with their reverse bows. The yachts now departing the German sheds are increasingly drawn in a different register: longer than their predecessors, but visually calmer, more deferent to the maritime tradition that produced them. Project Cosmos, also at Lürssen, brings methanol fuel-cell propulsion in a relatively traditional silhouette. The 120-metre Amels Project Tanzanite, the largest Dutch motor yacht ever built, is similarly disciplined in its lines.
For owners who have come up through a generation of more flamboyant builds, the appeal is clear enough. A yacht of 117 metres does not need to assert anything. The presence is automatic. What it can do, with the right designer and a confident owner, is retreat — into proportion, into white paint, into the quiet certainty of a long horizontal sheerline running 384 feet across a Mediterranean anchorage.
Boardwalk is, in this sense, a thesis statement disguised as a delivery. Lürssen and Frank Woll have built something that looks, at first glance, like a yacht that might have been launched twenty years ago. That is, almost certainly, exactly the point.
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Source of the image: boatinternational.com
