If Feadship as a shipyard is a dream factory, then the designers in the associated design department are professional dreamers. The proof is provided by a room within the office space separated by glass walls and doors. In it stands a man wearing VR goggles, sometimes waving both arms around with effort and sometimes gesticulating softly and slowly. It looks as if he is sleepwalking - or conducting. But he doesn't have an orchestra sitting in front of him; his hand movements in the seemingly empty space are followed by many lines and curves, as evidenced by a large wall monitor on which the three-dimensional model of a yacht is rapidly taking shape.
Listen, interpret, create
Thijs Orth holds controllers with mini joysticks and buttons in each hand. The designer from Studio De Voogt uses them to work on a living 3D object. Not to give free rein to his creativity or to create an ideal design. Sculpting with design software is an elementary component in the race for the attention of prospective owners. Modellers create detailed renders in record time on the basis of rapidly drawn exteriors. At present, the majority of Feadship's clientele have their own ideas in tow, which they develop with the Studio De Voogt team, rather than their own designer. The motto is: listen, interpret, create. "When it comes to design, time is always against us. By optimising processes, we can quickly go from a blank sheet of paper to the end product. For us, detailed 3D visualisations are an extended form of presentation," says Tanno Weeda as he guides us through the premises in Hoofddorp. The Dutchman has been Head of Design since 2020 and coordinates all the activities of the shipyard's own creative office. Before that, Weeda worked for over 20 years as a designer on projects such as "Venus" and "Promise".
Current figures validate the concept of short design and construction paths. Whereby the years 2024 and 2025 meant an unusually high frequency of completed individual constructions for Feadship. Within a year, the Dutch company launched nine custom yachts, totalling over 784 metres in length! Studio De Voogt designed the exteriors of five of the nine solitaires. "B" (59.5 metres) was launched in Aalsmeer in June 2024. Feadship docked in the same year "ONE" (75.75 m) in Kaag. In March 2025 "Moonrise" (101 m) of water under the keel and in May the 71.76 metre long Project 827. Last from the hall in Aalsmeer came "Valor" (79,5 m). And it goes on: three projects with lines from Studio De Voogt, from 50 to 89 metres, are in the fitting-out phase.
Spin-off from the shipyard's own design office
The design specifications and, in most cases, the structural substructure came from computers in Hoofddorp. Feadship moved into the four-storey office building in the immediate vicinity of Amsterdam Airport in 2021. Everyone comes together downstairs for lunch in the canteen, which looks more like a restaurant and relies on buffets instead of serving food by the ladle. The marketing and innovation departments are located on the top floor. Between them are designers, controllers, sales engineers, representatives of Feadship's refit and certification programme and the designers from Feadship De Voogt Naval Architects. At 120, they make up the lion's share of the employees in Hoofddorp.
Henri de Voogt initially launched the predecessor of De Voogt Naval Architects as a shipyard in Haarlem in 1913. In the 1920s, he began making shipbuilding calculations for yachts from the De Vries and Van Lent shipyards - both part of the current Feadship shipyard group. De Voogt underpinned his reputation as the greatest motor yacht designer of the pre-war era with the 54 metre long "Chasevar", which glided off the helm for the Shah of Persia in 1936. But not at Feadship. The organisation was founded in 1949 as an export association of Dutch yacht builders.
Henri de Voogt and, from 1960 onwards, his son Frits acted as the linchpin of the shipyard network. Almost all Feadships were designed by De Voogt Naval Architects until the early 1980s, mostly with the typical fine bow shapes and diagonal fashion plates between the decks. The increasing individualisation of owners was met in two ways: They were now also built according to the specifications of external designers and constructors, and the designers emancipated themselves from their shipbuilding mother with their own brand. Since 2005, the name Studio De Voogt has appeared in the specifications under exterior design.
Regular exchange
The disciplines continue to work closely together. The beautiful does not work without the complex - and vice versa. For example, some shipbuilding engineers sit at the level of the designers to check the feasibility of the three-dimensional frameworks, which, according to Weeda, are usually very close to what will later be built. Bram Jongepier is one of the technicians among the designers who is driving forward decarbonisation for Feadship and developed the cross-shipyard YETI score. Project group meetings are held on a regular basis.
The creative space is occupied by 15 studio employees without partitions, and there is a lively exchange of ideas from table to table. In front of the window, a Lego construction set from Projekt 715 is ready for the owner and his family, while numerous yacht models peek out from behind plants and monitors. The current ones come from the 3D printer and are used for checking proportions and proof of realisation. Jan Schaffers picks one up: "This one is already eleven years old. It's still pretty good, but this one is very, very different. It was printed and then polished." There are also champagne bottles that the team decapitated during the christenings of their projects. They write their construction numbers on the corks with a sharpie. The designers witness the final materialisation for a brief moment.
Visualisations determine the development process for Studio De Voogt. Dennis Kleiss ensures that yachts sail across screens in 3D that are barely distinguishable from the original before they hit the water. The 3D specialist integrated the software for free-form sketching into the design process and immerses himself in a parallel universe of lines and volumes. Kleiss gives visitors a brief introduction and VR glasses and remote controls. They are tempted to pull here and pull there to create sculptural shapes with concaves and bumps - everything you can imagine but cannot always represent in aluminium or steel.
Experienced users such as Kleiss or Orth produce an attractive rendering with strong lines after two days, which would otherwise have taken three weeks. A simple cube can form the basis of a complex 3D polygon model. A 2D sketch is loaded into the virtual world for orientation and the sculpting begins. Details are then modelled. "It's good for getting a feel for the volumes and the expression of the shapes," says designer Thijs Orth as he tries to create line fidelity. However, there are human limits to the process: Moving around in the digital parallel world is intuitive, but also exhausting. "Some people manage an hour or two. You can also do it all day. But it's better to take a break in between," emphasises Dennis Kleiss.
Feadships are full custom from keel to mast
Later, Thijs Orth sits in front of three monitors with VR goggles and controllers in his hands. "Then you can have really long sessions. But you can also work together. For example, if I'm working on the surface of the fuselage, another designer or modeller can do the superstructure." The meetings in the virtual space are also used for project handovers or to develop ideas together. Participants are visible as avatars and chat with each other, but should not be physically in the same room when working collaboratively.
Tanno Weeda heads up one floor and opens the archive. Photos of Feadships built in a similar year to Weeda's fly out of leather-bound books. The designer comments almost apologetically on a sundeck with a wetbar at the front, a plain white box with rounded corners: "Such simple shapes would no longer exist today." What now leaves the halls is in stark contrast to the typical Feadship formats of yesteryear. Although the dimensions and shapes within the size segments are similar, they always start from scratch. Even seemingly identical hulls are always unique and customised to the use and superstructure.
Customer proximity
At Studio De Voogt, full customisation applies all the more on a design level. Where independent design studios have developed their own style over the years, from which they are reluctant or sometimes unwilling to deviate, customers do not encounter pronounced egos and their "trademark lines" here. Tanno Weeda: "We have our own style, but also the freedom to be as individual and creative as possible and always very close to the customer. We don't just sell the design, we also sell the brand, the Feadship style." The complete programme includes interiors, of which there have only been two since the studio was decoupled. Most recently, Jan Schaffers looked after the exterior and interior of "Sibelle". Weeda and his team pride themselves on approaching designs with a maximum of impartiality.
How does it work? "Carte Blanche Experience" is the name of a process that allows customised designs to be created during a trade fair visit. The planned use or aesthetic preferences are queried. This includes yachts that appeal (across all shipyards!), favourite luxury brands, designer furniture and, of course, the contents of private garages. Based on this, a Studio De Voogt designer creates spontaneous designs on a tablet, which are further developed once or twice and presented to stand visitors live on displays as the final design, printed out and framed for the customer.
Head of Design Weeda leads the way upstairs, where innovation man Marc Levadou sits. "We are a good ten years ahead in the design department, but here they are about ten to 30 years ahead," says Tanno Weeda. Samples of alternative deck coverings lie on a shelf. The finite nature of natural teak reserves is well recognised and alternatives have been exposed to the weather on the roof for three years. These include synthetic decks, those made of cork, plantation teak, hardwoods such as lignia or ceramic. Back at the design level, Jan Schaffers sketches on a display directly in Photoshop. The designer also works analogue with a pencil and pad, which is the easiest way to interact with customers - and certainly the most impressive. "Many of the largest Feadships ever built were created at a meeting where we brought the owner's ideas to life on a blank sheet of paper," informs Feadships Chief Marketing Officer Farouk Nefzi over lunch in the canteen on the ground floor.
You can't do without analogue sketching
From initial sketches and concept designs to three-dimensional visuals, the process may seem straightforward. "We need about two months for a complete design," explains Studio De Voogt's Head of Design Weeda. Custom yachts, however, remain highly complex structures for which colleagues from the design department determine all the technical shipbuilding parameters in parallel with the design.
Construction is taking place at one of the four shipyard sites that surround Feadship's office building in Hoofddorp in concentric circles. The Feadship halls in Aalsmeer are almost on the doorstep. Within a radius of just under 20 kilometres, Kaag in the south is the oldest facility and Amsterdam in the north is the newest and largest. Makkum on the IJsselmeer is just under an hour and a half's drive away. Regardless of the building site, a visit to Tanno Weeda and his team in their office is recommended, including a creative 3D experience.
