Interior design Interior design
Chris d Craiker's sketch entitled, 'Living on a Sausalito Houseboat'.
Some repurposed vessels are left floating, permanently tethered to bays across the world while seeing out their new function. This includes Cunard’s Queen Mary, which now rests in Long Beach, California, having been retired in 1967 and gutted of most of its mechanics. Now, visitors are able to tour its decks and learn about its past; and it has been used as a film set for over 120 movies and TV shows, including 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, Pearl Harbor and Being John Malkovich. In addition, the famous Queen Elizabeth II was purchased in 2007 for $100m and opened a decade later in Dubai’s Mina Rashid port as a moored hotel with 1,300 rooms, and 13 restaurants and bars – and a museum for a lobby.
“The exterior structure of the steel hull makes the ship also very flexible, so the function of the ship can change over time. We focus on creating houses, but I can also easily imagine art galleries, offices, shops, restaurants and hotels.”
Joost van Rooijen
High-maintenance commodities Whether on land or on water, both Craiker and van Rooijen agree that the single biggest challenge of repurposing a ship is finding somewhere to place it. The vessels are first renovated and transformed indoors at a shipyard, then transported to a location via water because they are too large to
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be transported by road. So, a suitable final spot needs to be reachable by water, while taking into account any bridges and sluices along the route. The ships require very large plots of land to be grounded on, and it can be difficult to find areas that are big enough where housing is allowed. If they are to remain floating, the boats require a deep-water port to accommodate them. In 2020, Ocean Builders side-stepped this issue when it decided to anchor its latest renovation 30-minutes from shore. The company announced it would be transforming the 30-year-old former Pacific Dawn into a giant floating housing complex that would be anchored 12 miles from the shore of Panama City, marketing it as a living and working space for “digital nomads, YouTube influencers and crypto-currency enthusiasts”.
The 804ft, 777-cabin, 12-deck ship offers a microcosm of normal life on land, comprising a range of restaurants and cafés, as well as whirlpools and even a waterpark. However, it remains to be seen whether people would be content living so far from terra firma for more than a few months, and its location undoubtedly poses a challenge when it comes to moving day.
While such enterprises are still very green, and fresh ideas for obsolete titans of the sea are constantly being explored, the environmental benefits to reusing such large commodities are unquestionable. And at a time when the future of the cruise-ship industry has faced inconceivable challenges, one thing is certain: the possibilities for the vessels themselves are endless. ●
World Cruise Industry Review /
www.worldcruiseindustryreview.com
Chris d Craiker
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