Sarissa

One hull, two ambitions

The brief behind Sarissa asked for a contradiction, a sloop that could cruise the world in family comfort and still sail like a big raceboat. Malcolm McKeon, whose name is on many of the fastest large sloops afloat, drew both the lines and the naval architecture, and Royal Huisman engineered the package to sit just under the 500 gross ton regulatory line, the threshold that keeps a world-cruising yacht in the simpler compliance regime owners prefer.

The materials tell the story. The hull is Alustar aluminium for strength and longevity, while the superstructure is carbon composite to strip weight where it hurts stability most, high up. It is exactly the hybrid logic the yard later formalised as Featherlight, applied here at nearly 60 metres, and it is why a yacht with this interior volume still behaves like a performance boat.

The disappearing machinery

Sarissa's party trick is what cannot be seen. Her propulsion is retractable, the drive leg folds away when she sails, leaving a clean hull with nothing dragging behind it. Combined with battery-electric capability, she can slip out of an anchorage in silence, no diesel note, no wake of exhaust, a mode of operation that changes how mornings on board feel.

Aft, a large-scale opening transom with a carbon fibre door folds the back of the yacht open to the sea. It is a piece of engineering theatre that turns the stern into a beach, and on a sailing yacht of this performance pedigree it is rare, sailing purists usually sacrifice that kind of living space. Sarissa's owners were not asked to.

Sarissa swept the International Superyacht Society awards, Yacht of the Year, Best in Sail 40 m+ and Best Interior in a single season.

Liaigre below decks

For the interior the owners went to Liaigre, the Paris house whose restraint has defined quiet luxury for three decades. The studio delivered calm, low-contrast spaces in natural materials, drawn tight to the hull's athletic geometry. Twelve guests sleep in five staterooms, a remarkable count for a sloop that races, and a crew of twelve runs the yacht without crossing guest sightlines.

The judges noticed. At the International Superyacht Society awards Sarissa took Best Interior against the whole sailing fleet, alongside Best in Sail 40 m+ and the overall Yacht of the Year title. Award seasons come and go, but a clean sweep across design, category and overall honours is the kind of result that follows a yacht into the brokerage market for the rest of her life.

Built by the rig maker

Like every Huisman sloop, Sarissa carries a rig from Rondal, the group's own spar and hardware company, engineered together with the hull as a single structural system. That integration matters most at this scale, where rig loads run into hundreds of tonnes and the difference between a good boat and a great one is how honestly the loads were modelled before anything was built.

The owners' team, led by Monks Large Yacht Consultancy, ran the project alongside the yard, a working method Royal Huisman encourages. The yard's projects are shaped by owner's captains, racing sailors and independent engineers arguing details for years before launch, and Sarissa is what that argument produces when everyone involved has done it before.

Where she sits in the market

The large performance sloop is arguably the most competitive corner of custom sailing, the segment where McKeon, the great Italian builders and the Dutch yards all meet. Sarissa is Royal Huisman's current statement in that fight, and the awards suggest the statement landed. She is also recent, delivered in 2023, so her systems, hybrid capability and compliance are current rules, current technology.

For an owner specifying a new sloop in this class, she is the reference visit. For an owner who wants the result without the four-year build, yachts like Sarissa reach the market perhaps once a decade. Either way she defines the standard, a sub-500 GT world cruiser that gave up nothing to get there.

Who it is for: The owner who wants a world-cruising sloop with raceboat manners, current hybrid technology and an interior by the quietest name in luxury.