You’ll either love it or hate it. There is little doubt that the Sunbeam 32.1 is a Marmite boat, and that’s exactly what her creators set out to build. With a chiseled-out bow that’s more than a little sharklike, and wide bowsprit, or ‘flightdeck’ as Sunbeam are calling it, and an interior that is closer to a Bond villain’s mountain lair than a traditional yacht, this is one of the most radical-looking cruisers to hit the water in recent years.
So what is it, and why does it look like that? Well, after 70 years of building everything from dinghies, through stylish-but-understated lake sailors, to 53ft blue-water cruisers, Sunbeam has a new hand on the tiller. Andreas Schöchl recently took over as the third generation to run the family shipyard which grew out of a carpentry business nearly 200 years old. Competition is stiff in the boatbuilding world, and Andreas was bored of white fibreglass yachts that all looked virtually the same. He wanted to build boats that stood out. For a boatyard perched on the shores of the diminutive Mattsee in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, it made sense to focus on smaller boats sailed on the large European lakes, as well as in the Mediterranean and the continental Atlantic coast.
He started with a blank sheet of paper and began by outlining a typical sailing day for their intended buyers. This was based in part on feedback to their previous 28ft model, which was originally fitted out as
