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Tony Accurso broke all the rules in building his 119-foot dream boat.
by H. Shaw McCutcheon
photography by H. Shaw McCutcheon
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08/01/2005
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People desiring a luxury yacht typically engage a broker or
spend years working with a naval architect and a shipyard. Tony Accurso is not
typical. A builder of everything from driveways to skyscrapers, Accurso figured
he would just build himself a yacht. After all, he’d built subways; what was the
big deal about a boat? "I’m an entrepreneur," he commented later. "So I think I
can build anything."
The lavish decor features creative elements, such as the use of
glass in the main salon’s bar (top) and as "curtains" in the pass-through to the dining
area (bottom). (Click images to enlarge)
He had searched the yacht market and couldn’t find
anything that met his exacting requirements. "I didn’t find a boat with four
king-size beds; I didn’t find a boat with a six-person hot tub on the aft deck,
I didn’t find a boat with two washers and two dryers," he noted. And he didn’t
want to compromise.
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Thus began one of the most improbable yacht construction
projects in recent history, a 10-year saga of perseverance through bitter-cold
Canadian winters, dozens of revisions and a tremendous learning curve that
culminated with the launch of a 119-foot tri-deck motor yacht called
Touch.
In 1994, Accurso purchased an aging but well-built
91-foot-long, 25-foot-beam motor yacht at a Florida auction and took it home to
Montreal. He got a couple of his cranes, hauled it out of the water onto a
vacant lot and built a shed around it. At first he planned simply to remodel the
superstructure, but his ideas escalated and he eventually gutted the boat down
to the basic hull and began to rebuild it from scratch.
The upper-deck master (top) is a vision in
gold, while one of the king guest rooms (bottom) incorporates a nicely
contrasting royal blue – a color scheme used throughout. (Click images to enlarge)
To manage the build,
he hired Michel Dufresne, a French-Canadian yacht designer with long experience
in sailing vessels, but no practical work on large motor yachts. For the next
six years it was an on-again, off-again project for gregarious, affable Accurso.
It wasn’t until the end of 1999, after enough ideas had percolated through his
fertile imagination onto architectural drawings, that the project began in
earnest.
One of Dufresne’s biggest challenges was finding a crew to build the
yacht. There aren’t many yacht-building specialists in eastern Canada, so with
Accurso’s help he pulled together teams of welders, electricians, plumbers and
other craftsmen who had constructed buildings – but never a boat. Dufresne
became their tutor, detailing to them the differences between a simple home and
a complex yacht. "For example, vibration is » important," he
explained. "You have to plan for electricity to withstand vibration. Also, the
power system has to be capable of handling power from ports anywhere in the
world."
Dufresne’s most stressful task was managing multiple crews simultaneously. At one point, 75 workmen were on the boat. And in Quebec,
wintertime temperatures sometimes reached minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, so cold
that certain projects had to be put on hold inside the modestly heated
shed.
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