Design Showcase: Luxury Underfoot
Louis Postel
10/01/2007

Somewhere off Sardinia, supermodel Naomi Campbell purportedly traipsed across the floor of the 206-foot Force Blue. Barefoot, she may have alighted on the circular parquet pattern designer Celeste Dell’Anna had inserted there in a honey-hued oak.

"It’s especially magical when the sunset reflects on it," says Dell’Anna.

Force Blue’s parquet floors aglow. Photograph by Marc Paris. (Click image to enlarge)

Campbell embodies the carefree, barefoot spirit of yachting, its giddy freedom and exhilaration, all of which designers such as Dell’Anna, Glade Johnson and François Zuretti find themselves supporting with ever more detailed and luxurious flooring. One can imagine her with a pair of Manolo Blahnik snakeskin pumps dangling from one hand.

When Dell’Anna designed the S/Y Mau Mau for Italian helicopter magnate Corrado Agusta in 1982, it was considered a very big boat at 154 feet. Now, says the designer, 154 feet is small. "People will want to know whose tender it is. Today we have floating palaces."

And, commensurately, that’s the challenge with yacht floors—how to make them palatial as well. The cherry and walnut flooring with "small square designs" that Dell’Anna used in the past now have been replaced by waterjet-cut parquets and medallions, marble slabs with precious compass stone inlays and luminous silk rugs woven in Nepal for the staterooms. Just to give you an idea of the elaborate nature of these new types of flooring, consider the first 20 feet of entry area as you enter the aft doors into the main salon of the 226-foot Feadship Attessa: eight different marbles including a rare, dark green "veinless" marble from Guatemala, a peachy breccia oniciata from Italy, with the field in a gray and cream Botticino, and so on, all properly book-matched so that the veins on all the marble slabs correspond exactly.

Top: Black carpet squares on Phoenix. Photograph by Stéphane Bravin. Bottom: This marble bath on Oasis evokes ancient Greece. Photograph by Klaus Jordan. (Click images to enlarge)

Ornamentation, it would seem, is a necessary thing. "Acres of uninterrupted hardwood or marble is just too much," says Linda Varone, a consultant and lecturer on design psychology at Harvard University and elsewhere. "The medallions and starbursts anchor us and pull us together. We also need differences in texture and color to create gathering points and conversational groupings. Floors are key to making us feel grounded, on land or sea."

Designers also point out that the current enthusiasm for ornamentation and luxurious materials on yacht floors serves another purpose as well. No matter how palatial a yacht is in size, its ceiling height is necessarily low, making it better to draw attention to the floor where there is more room for expression. The nature of that expression is often in the mode of "traditional with a twist": classic features and enrichments but lighter in tone, cleaner in detail. As for wear and tear, with climate controls, refits averaging every three years and most of the passengers padding around barefoot, wear and tear is less of an issue than one might think.

Returning to the parquetry of Force Blue’s medium deck salon, there’s certainly magic to what designer Dell’Anna created. The parquet of distressed oak forms a stylized penumbra under an illuminated bluish ring in the ceiling soffit. There’s a halo above, figuratively speaking, that’s reflected in tiles of light on the floor. And it’s all fairly low key, but nevertheless emotional and classic. And it’s even more heavenly when, as we said in the beginning, an obliging sunset burnishes the oak still further.

"I don’t like any one thing to show off more than another," says Dell’Anna, referring to the symmetry between the parquet and the soffits above it. "There should always be good balance. Proportion is the essence of good architecture. If you do a nice proportion the result is guaranteed. However, I can’t explain what it is and what it’s not."
Proportion may be the essence, but a healthy investment surely helps with the details. Dell’Anna tells the story of one client who basically told him he was "mad" for making him spend so much money on silk carpets in the staterooms. At $1,500 to $2,000 per square meter, wouldn’t wool do instead? Dell’Anna took him to a boat show to show him the difference firsthand: the radiant brilliance of silk, its uncanny ability to capture light, causing the twisted strands to glow in unique ways. And that’s all it took; one look, one touch, according to Dell’Anna. Now the client insists on silk.

Top: Blue patterned flooring on Oasis. Photograph by Klaus Jordan. Bottom: Ambrosia’s study is paved in leather. Photograph by Bill Muncke and Ingo. (Click images to enlarge)

Renaissance Italians practically invented what we think of today as "palatial," so when creating "floating palaces," it’s good to bear in mind their absolute obsession with perspective. A distant point, a dramatic, powerful view was more important than breathing. That’s how the sunburst design works on the marble floor of Attessa’s main-deck conservatory salon. The most impressive floor design of Glade Johnson’s to date, the sunburst pattern sweeps the eye along just as you enter the aft doors into a grand perspective. Coupled with a silk paneled ring recessed in the ceiling along with a Lalique lighting fixture, the sunburst marble on the floor points you majestically into the mid-lounge and then even deeper into the forward lounge. Those 20 feet of marble aft form a kind of staging area for all the design elements that follow.

"The real challenge with marble is weight," says Johnson, who is based in Seattle, Washington. "But it’s just another layer of complication, an additional cost. You need very sophisticated craftspeople bonding quarter-inch marble panels to an aluminum honeycomb [base]. And now with waterjet technology, you can cut very intricate patterns. The patterns and grout lines help prevent slipping, instead of just having a large expanse of polished stone. We really prefer a combination of wood and stone together, with a more formal look on the main deck and main salon. Then as you meander through the space to the upper-deck salon there would be more wood and less marble. Just a bit more casual."

Top: Concentric circles on Phoenix create a centripetal force to the carpet’s disparate elements. Photograph by Stéphane Bravin. Bottom: Dark curves break up the white in Force Blue’s bath. Photograph by Marc Paris. (Click images to enlarge)

Jeff Homchick of Luxe Stone Technology was the installer on the Attessa project and works with many of the major shipyards: Westport, Christensen, Delta Marine, Trinity and now Lürssen. With 3,000 slabs in stock and another 2,500 on order, Homchick can show customers what the floor will actually look like as opposed to a three-inch-square chip or by visiting stone quarries around the world. But the real magic is the processing.

"The reason these thin, quarter-inch panels don’t break is that they are very flexible," Homchick says. "Flexible enough to be used on a moving vessel."

After a block is selected, it’s squared off and cleaned up and then put in an oven to bake out all the fissures. Next it’s put in an autoclave and taken down about seven atmospheres, producing enormous pressure. Then the entire block is infused with resin. High-tech epoxy and polyurethane-coated substrate allow the boat to "twist" all it wants without impacting the floor. For floor inlays, Homchick offers a wide variety of precious and semi-precious stone besides marble: lapis, malachite, onyx, mother of pearl. Currently he’s testing a petrified sequoia to see if his gang saws can possibly slice it.

François Zuretti arguably has the last word in palatial floors, one that’s thematically out of this world. In the dining room of the third Ambrosia, he created a space theme in passing reference to his client’s aeronautical business. He composed the floor out of high-tech stainless steel panels complete with small craters and re-created moon vehicle tire tracks. "The only problem," says Zuretti, "was to hold back on the concept before it started looking artificial, like a movie set."

Even those who own floating palaces with luxurious floors need occasional reality checks. As Linda Varone points out, we need those floors to help us feel psychologically grounded.