On a sunny Saturday morning in July 2019, Marnix Hoekstra arrived at the Yacht Club de Monaco with little idea why he was actually there.
“Come and meet a group of people,” Dennis Frederiksen from Fraser had told the co-creative director at Dutch studio Vripack.“You won't regret it.” Frederiksen, a broker who has sold £1 billion of boats in a 40-year career, is a meeting worth taking for any superyacht designer, no matter how cryptic the brief.
The group Hoekstra would see was Foundation Zero, a set of impact investors whose headline ambition was to create the world's first fossil-fuel-free superyacht: no combustion engine, no fuel tanks. But it would be as much about the journey to get there as the finished project: outside-the-box solutions; brave experiments; new (and expensive) testing; capacious data collection and analysis. An ecosystem of creative engineering and exciting leads, all of which would be gifted to others via open-source publishing. Nearly five years later the yacht, which is in the outfitting phase at Vitters Shipyard, is a showstopping proof of concept.
The members of the foundation knewyachting – that's why they wanted to develop sustainable marine hospitality solutions. They also knew that a bare bones “test boat” wouldn't be much use to an industry whose customer base expects top level luxury; comfort and appealing aesthetics had to be built in, no compromise. The leaders of the foundation had the germ of a plan for Project Zero in 2019, but when they enquired with
