NAVIS Aug/Sept'26

Every yacht enforces one small ritual that almost no house does: at the passerelle, the shoes come off. From that moment on, the floor stops being something you look at and becomes something you feel — the first sensation of the morning, the last one of the night, the surface a barefoot guest reads more closely than any wall, fabric, or finish on board. Ashore, flooring is judged by the eye. At sea, it is judged by the skin.

That simple fact changes everything about how a carpet for a yacht should be conceived. It explains why the finest interiors treat the floor not as a background but as an instrument — tuned for touch, sound, light, and longevity in one of the most demanding environments a textile will ever serve.

CRN’s Transformation of Project Maranello into Modern Masterpiece

What’s in a name? Amor à Vida’s answer is all about loving life and living in the moment. This 67-meter, full-custom build that is, at once, both home and yacht. She demonstrates an easy blend of luxury with function and technical sophistication with casual comfort, built for living life to its fullest with family and friends.

Born as Project Maranello, her Nuvolari Lenard hull and superstructure lines were influenced by automotive details, Maranello being the home of Ferrari motor cars and a favorite of the owner. Interiors by Nuvolari Lenard and Valentina Zannier maintained an unforced, elegant relationship with sea. Delighting guests with both beautiful details and an extensive menu of amenities, Project Maranello proved so much more than her automotive sparks, leading to her christening as Amor à Vida, translating to “Love for Life” from Portuguese.

In a world of instant gratification and bespoke creativity, yacht owners no longer have to choose between a comfortable sailing yacht and a competitive racing yacht. Technology and design have advanced the option to choose both cruising and racing as priorities in a sort of technical alchemy, achieving magical results with modern materials. The Vitters 44-meter sloop Magic is designed to sail a competitive race, yet offer a safe, comfortable cruising itinerary for friends and family.

This fast-cruising sloop is equipped to handle the role of performance racer through technical expertise of Reichel/Pugh Design. Her owner’s brief expressed a wish to safely and comfortably accommodate a multi-generational family in addition to answering the thrilling call of competitive regattas.

Every human on the planet has the same twenty-four hours in each day, passing quickly for some, more slowly for others. What truly matters is how those hours are spent. Enjoying time on board the Amels 242 Limited Edition Synthesis suspends the emphasis on time, replacing it instead with living in the moment, fully and completely, relaxed and at ease with all that life brings.

Synthesis is the fifth yacht in this limited-edition series from Amels, a flagship brand of Damen Shipyards Group. She was delivered in January of 2021 from the Dutch shipyard in Vlissingen. Kept in ultra pristine condition through a 2023 upgrade at Oceanco and a five-year special survey with upgrades and a full exterior repaint at Amels completed in 2026, she holds her own even among the most recently delivered vessels.

Every September, the eyes of the superyacht world turn to Port Hercule. For four days, Monaco becomes the place where the industry’s leading shipyards, designers and innovators reveal not only their latest creations, but also the direction in which yachting is heading.

This year’s Monaco Yacht Show promises to be one of the strongest editions in recent memory. With more than 120 exceptional yachts expected to line the harbour, including over 40 world premieres, visitors will once again witness the finest examples of craftsmanship, engineering and design. Yet beyond the impressive numbers lies a more compelling story. The yachts making their debut in Monaco reflect an industry that is evolving rapidly, placing greater emphasis on innovation, sustainability and highly personalised owner experiences.

To be clear, St. Moritz has never lacked for serious tables, but it has, until recently, lacked a genuinely good Greek one, which is the gap NEORA arrived to fill. The venue is tucked into the Grand Hotel des Bains Kempinski and built entirely around the meze instinct: order widely, share generously, and let the table fill up faster than anyone can keep track of. The premise, as the restaurant tells it, is filoxenia, the old Greek concept of hospitality as something closer to devotion than service and, on the evidence of our recent long dinner, the kitchen and the floor both take it seriously.

NEORA does not look like a hotel restaurant that happened to end up serving Greek food; it looks like a considered translation of the Aegean with only a hint of an Alpine accent. Handcrafted ceramics, marble-topped tables, curated Greek artwork, and a crystal chandelier overhead combine to make a plate of ouzo-doused mussels feel entirely appropriate to the setting, and the room manages the trick of feeling both bright enough for an early dinner and moody enough to hold its own once the candlelight takes over.

Heritage Reimagined

Glitzy St. Moritz didn’t have to work particularly hard on convincing the world that winter could mean fashionable opulence rather than bone-chilling inconvenience. The Grand Hotel des Bains Kempinski was built in 1864—coincidentally the very same year a hotelier wagered his departing English guests that the resort town’s winter sun, coupled with its dry, crisp “champagne” climate, would be just as agreeable as its summer sun. With 322 days of sunlight a year, who could possibly disagree, and so development began in earnest. This hotel rose beside the effervescently iron-rich Mauritius Spring that drew the town’s earliest visitors, predating the ski lift, the Cresta Run, and much of Europe’s “grand hotel” tradition itself.

The hotel’s history, like St. Moritz’s, is lengthy although not without setbacks. Two Mediterranean palazzo-style floors constructed in 1864, its now-signature corner towers added in 1905, then a lengthy vacancy from 1914 to 1958, interrupted only for the Olympic Winter Games of 1928 and 1948, of course. Then in 2001, Viennese architect Franz Schnabel oversaw the fourteen-month renovation that gave the hotel its present appearance, and the work has continued in earnest ever since — a 26-room wing reimagined in 2023, 62 units reborn as 51 suites in 2024, and, most recently, the transformation of the storied Cà d’Oro dining room into NEORA, introducing the valley’s first Greek restaurant. All in all, a steady approach, to continually improve upon itself to create a winter wonderland, clearly emulating the town’s tagline: Always evolving, always unforgettable.

Industrial designers understand something that marketing departments rarely acknowledge: the final version of a product is seldom the most revolutionary. It is the most resolved.

The McLaren 788HS embodies that idea. It closes a chapter that began with the 720S in 2017, evolved through the 765LT and 750S, and reaches its ultimate expression here. This is not a clean-sheet design chasing novelty. It is nearly a decade of engineering distilled into its purest form.

The philosophy begins beneath the bodywork. At its core sits McLaren’s carbon-fibre Monocage II, an exceptionally rigid passenger cell that defines everything built around it. Unlike a conventional aluminium chassis, the carbon structure resists flex under load, allowing the suspension and steering to work with remarkable precision. It also shapes the car’s architecture. The low roofline, slender pillars and expansive windscreen exist because the chassis is simultaneously lightweight, compact and extraordinarily strong.