Design
Instant recognition
Nautor’s Swan has a unique reputation and its current offering is truly extraordinary, ranging from the most luxurious of world cruising yachts to some of today’s most advanced and sophisticated one design racers
It’s one of the most iconic brands in yachting. For the last 50 years, Nautor’s Swan has held a unique position in the boatbuilding industry, achieving a successful and precise balance between heritage and innovation while producing some of the finest large, high-performance sailing yachts afloat.
It all started in 1970 when an expert client asked Nautor – a young, up-and-coming boatbuilder back then – to build a 17-metre racing yawl in fibreglass, to a design by Sparkman & Stephens. It was a pioneering project. At that time, the Swan 55 was one of the largest yachts ever to be built in GRP and also one of the largest ever produced in series. Sixteen of them were built and Nautor’s Swan never looked back. Its next model, the Swan 65, won the first Whitbread Round The World Race in 1973 and the rest is history. Almost everything has changed since then, in terms of technology and also the ways in which we choose to sail, yet it’s still possible to follow a continuous evolution of large Swan yachts from the S&S-designed race winners of the early 1970s through many generations of designs to the three current models in the MaxiSwan division, the Swan 120, 98 and 88. At any time between then and now, the essential qualities and hallmarks that define a Swan – and especially a maxi-size Swan – have remained constant. And it’s not about grand prix racing results but it is all about innovation.
‘Our company culture is founded in our heritage but we always look
68 SEAHORSE
forward,’ says Giovanni Pomati, chief executive at Nautor’s Swan. ‘Throughout our history technology has always been our inspiration.’ The distilled essence of Swan is not just a yacht that looks good, sails well and is built by master craftsmen using top-quality materials. There’s more to it than that. On the water, most keen sailors can somehow recognise a Swan – almost any Swan – from a mile away. At the helm, any Swan will behave, react and feel like a thoroughbred. And while the design of Swans inside and out has always been strongly informed by the latest ideas, they also have a surprising ability to stand the test of time, as witnessed by their high resale value and the fact that many Swans aren’t sold but stay in the family, passed down from one generation to the next. ‘When you buy a Swan you’re buying something that lasts a lifetime,’ Pomati says. ‘Nothing is more sustainable than forever.’ An important element of Swan’s success throughout the last four decades is the strong design partnership with Germán Frers, which continues to this day. ‘The first Swan I designed was the 51 right after the 1979 Fastnet Race,’ Frers recalls. ‘She was the Swan version of
Blizzard, the 51-footer that did extremely well during the Admiral’s Cup inshore races. I was not involved in any of the Swan designs during my time at S&S. I just heard all the good comments Rod Stephens made about the Swan builders in Finland and looked over my shoulder at the work Frank Kinney was doing on
Above: the brand new Swan 88 points the way to the Maxi Swan division’s future. Key design hall- marks include high-volume hulls with exceptional form stability, dual-use deck plans that give equal emphasis to use at anchor and under way, and huge through-hull windows to flood the interior with natural light. Today’s Maxi Swans are packed with motor yacht- inspired inno- vations like underwater lighting and beach club facilities in fold-down transom sterns
the Swan 43, their second model.’ Frers’ 41-year tenure (and counting) as Nautor’s designer of choice is arguably one of his greatest achievements in a remarkable career. ‘Swans have been the most copied and imitated sailing yachts over the last 30 or 40 years,’ he says, ‘But there has always been an element of uniqueness within the Swan DNA that has never been matched.’ Unsurprisingly, though, he is coy about the contents of his secret recipe.
The turn of the millennium brought fundamental change: first the creation of ClubSwan in 1999 and more recently the establishment of the MaxiSwan division. An important milestone was the launch of the Swan 115 in 2015. ‘I was not here when Leonardo Ferragamo separated the product lines but it was the right decision,’ Pomati says. ‘It allowed us to get more focused with the targeting of our different yachts. Our Swan and Maxi Swan divisions have more DNA in common than ClubSwan but there is an important difference between them.’ For the smaller Swans there is a strong focus on the efficiency and repeatability of production processes, while the MaxiSwans are built with different construction techniques more appropriate to small-series production and the yachts’ large size. While the Swan division offers ample scope for customisation within the parameters of series production, MaxiSwan takes it to a different level. A typical new build project will have considerable
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120
