Judel/Vrolijk & Co

Two Racers Who Started a Studio in 1978

The firm's roots are in rule-beating race design rather than styling: Judel and Vrolijk both came up designing to the International Offshore Rule, the handicap system that dominated ocean racing through the 1970s and 1980s, and that background shows in how the studio still talks about its work today. Conradi told Giornale della Vela in September 2025 that joining the practice brought immediate growth, with the team almost doubling in size not long after he arrived, and the studio now operates from Bremerhaven; an earlier, single-sourced account places the original founding address in Hamburg, a detail this research could not independently confirm against a second outlet.

The studio's own figures, repeated across trade coverage rather than independently audited, put its output at more than 800 boats since 1978, a number that spans one-off superyachts, the racing fleet described below and decades of series production. Current leadership sits with Conradi, Johan Siefer and Tobias Kohl, who heads the racing division; the practice describes a compact core team of around fourteen naval architects plus two interns, averaging 40 years old with roughly twelve years' tenure each, a stability unusual in a design trade that turns staff over quickly.

Rolf Vrolijk Brought the America's Cup to Europe

Vrolijk's Cup career did not start with Alinghi. He designed ESP-47, raced as Bravo Espana, for Spain's challenge in the 2000 Louis Vuitton Cup, a campaign that finished seventh of eleven challengers and gave him a working Cup-class design under his belt before Russell Coutts recruited him to the Swiss syndicate. Winning as a first-time entrant, and doing it 5-0, is the result that put Judel/Vrolijk's racing pedigree ahead of almost any rival design office's, and Vrolijk has since been inducted into the America's Cup Hall of Fame.

That racing record is the credibility the studio's cruising and superyacht clients are buying into even when the boat they commission never sees a start line: Tobias Kohl, who now runs the racing side, told Giornale della Vela the team judges itself by whether its boats perform better than their handicap rating, a race-office measure of success that carries over directly into how Judel/Vrolijk designs hull shape and rig for its large custom sloops.

Rolf Vrolijk was chief designer of Alinghi's SUI-64, which beat Team New Zealand 5-0 in the 2003 America's Cup and carried the trophy to Europe for the first time in the regatta's history. He repeated the win as Alinghi's chief designer again in 2007.

Pink Gin VI: the Largest Carbon Sloop of Its Moment

The build paired Judel/Vrolijk's naval architecture with Baltic Yachts' carbon-composite construction, the combination the yard and studio have returned to repeatedly for their largest custom projects. Photography from Baltic Yachts' own press materials, credited to photographer Jeff Brown, shows the finished yacht under full sail off Sardinia and Corsica, her low freeboard and long overhangs closer to a scaled-up racing yacht than a cruising superyacht, which is the look the studio's racing background is known for delivering even on boats built primarily to cruise.

The resale is the only hard pricing data point this research found anywhere for a Judel/Vrolijk flagship: a five-year-old yacht selling at roughly 60 per cent of its reported original asking price is normal enough for the large-sloop resale market, but no source states what Baltic Yachts and Judel/Vrolijk actually charged to design and build her new, which is true of every project below as well.

Path: the First Full Exterior, Interior and Naval Architecture Commission

Henry Hawkins, Baltic Yachts' executive vice president, told BOAT International in May 2022 that the yard and owner considered electric propulsion for Path but settled on a conventional system because the boat was conceived as a genuine world cruiser, where proven reliability mattered more than a headline specification. Rolf Vrolijk described the commission itself as an owner who already knew exactly what he wanted, saying there was no need to bring in an external designer to make a statement, a telling line from a studio whose custom flagships more often pair its naval architecture with someone else's styling.

Margo Vrolijk, credited with the interior, said the concept was built around how the owner's family actually lives ashore rather than a set-piece superyacht brief, and the finished boat backs that up: warm varnished joinery throughout, a deckhouse saloon glazed on three sides so the family stays connected to the deck in poor weather, and a study lined in bookshelves with a backlit photograph of a humpback whale and calf built into the panelling above the sofa, the kind of detail that reads as a family's own choice rather than a decorator's set dressing.

The Wally Fleet: Naval Architecture Under Someone Else's Styling

Rolf Vrolijk has spoken about his long relationship with Luca Bassani, Wally's founder, telling Giornale della Vela he has known Bassani since the 1970s and that Bassani always pushed for innovation, a friendship that predates both men's most famous work and explains why Judel/Vrolijk keeps returning to the brand across three different builders rather than one settled yard relationship. Galma, delivered in 2024, matters beyond its own specification because it is the first hull of a semi-custom series, wallywind110, meaning Judel/Vrolijk's naval architecture now underwrites a production model rather than a single custom commission.

The studio's older Baltic 116 sloop Doryan, delivered to Baltic Yachts at roughly 35.4 metres in the mid-2010s with an interior by Nauta Design, sits in the same category: Judel/Vrolijk's name attached to the hull and rig, another studio credited for how the boat actually looks and feels below decks. Reported delivery dates for Doryan vary by a year between sources, which this research could not resolve, and is noted here rather than silently picked one way.

Hanse, Baltic and Najad: Fifty Series Models and Counting

This is the side of the business a custom-yacht buyer rarely thinks about but that actually pays the studio's bills between flagship commissions: designing a production sailboat range is a multi-year, low-margin-per-hull relationship that only works at real volume, and having supplied Hanse's entire range for a quarter of a century is a scale of institutional trust few design studios in this pillar can claim. The studio markets roughly fifty models designed across more than twenty shipyards in total, a figure that, unlike the 800-boat claim, is at least broadly consistent with the list of named production partners found in this research.

What this production work buys a custom client is depth of engineering practice: a studio drawing fifty-plus production hulls has run far more structural, stability and rig-loading calculations than one drawing only a handful of one-off superyachts, and Judel/Vrolijk's custom flagships, Pink Gin VI and Path chief among them, both read as boats designed by people who spend most of their working year on boats that have to perform reliably for owners who are not present to make allowances.

What a Commission Costs, and What Nobody Publishes

That silence on pricing is consistent across the whole custom fleet: no source found here states what Baltic Yachts and Judel/Vrolijk charged an owner to build Path, what Green Marine charged for Hamilton, or what the Ferretti Group's Wally yard charged for Galma. The general yacht-design market band quoted elsewhere in this pillar, roughly 1 to 5 per cent of build cost for the designer plus a further 2 to 4 per cent for project management, is an industry-wide figure and not specific to this studio.

Commissioning runs through whichever yard is building the boat rather than through a single unified Judel/Vrolijk sales channel, since the studio's custom work is spread across Baltic Yachts, Green Marine, the Ferretti-owned Wally yard and, on the production side, Hanse, Najad, Dehler and Contest directly. An owner interested in the studio's naval architecture on a new commission is, in practice, choosing a yard first and asking whether Judel/Vrolijk is already the yard's design partner, rather than approaching the Bremerhaven office cold.

Who Should Call Bremerhaven

The strongest argument for Judel/Vrolijk is the one number that is not in dispute: Rolf Vrolijk's Alinghi design brought the America's Cup to Europe for the first time, 5-0, and that is a harder credential to match than any styling portfolio. Path shows what the studio can do when it is trusted with the whole brief, exterior, interior and naval architecture together, and Henry Hawkins' and Margo Vrolijk's accounts of that project both back up the studio's own description of a design process built around how a family actually uses a boat rather than how it photographs at a show.

The honest caution is that Path is the exception rather than the rule: on Pink Gin VI, Hamilton, Bullitt and Galma, Judel/Vrolijk supplied naval architecture only, with the exterior and interior credited elsewhere, so an owner who wants a single practice to own the whole aesthetic should ask directly, before signing, whether this commission will run the Path way or the Pink Gin way. No fee scale, no staff count beyond the studio's own broad claims, and unresolved discrepancies over founding location and at least one delivery date are real gaps in the public record for a studio of this stature, and worth raising directly with the office rather than assuming.

Für wen: Owners who want a large, genuinely fast custom sailing yacht with naval architecture from a team carrying an America's Cup-winning pedigree, and who are comfortable commissioning that naval architecture from one office while a separate studio handles exterior styling or interior on most projects; a weaker fit for an owner who wants a single practice to own the whole look of the boat as standard, since that has only happened once, on Path.