Dubois Naval Architects

From Jersey to His Own Name

Edward George Dubois was born on 18 April 1952 in Surrey, England, attended Whitgift School and graduated from Southampton College of Technology in 1974. He went to work for the naval architect Alan Buchanan in Jersey, and it was there that a local restaurateur, George Skelly, became his first client. The result, a three-quarter tonner called Borsalino Trois, won the British Trials for the Three Quarter Ton Cup, the RORC Class IV overall prize and the Solent Points Championship in 1976, Dubois's first design and already a winner.

He founded Dubois Naval Architects the following year, in 1977, and the practice was incorporated as a limited company, Dubois Naval Architects Limited, on 27 October 1982, per Companies House records. The 1970s and early 1980s were a racing apprenticeship as much as a design career: further raceboats, including Police Car, which topped the scoring for Australia's winning 1979 Admiral's Cup team, built the reputation that let Dubois move from quarter tonners into much larger commissions through the 1980s.

Aquel II and the Move Into Superyachts

Aquel II is remembered in Dubois's Yachting World obituary as the design that established his large-yacht vocabulary: powerful, low-slung hulls with a wraparound deckhouse window line that kicks up at its lower edge, a signature visible on nearly every big Dubois yacht that followed. He worked the traditional way throughout his career, with a pencil and a spline rather than yacht-design software, and conceived hulls three-dimensionally rather than off a set of two-dimensional drawings, according to the same obituary.

Esprit, a 32m sloop Crichton ordered from Dubois in 1987, is the commission credited with starting Alloy Yachts in New Zealand, the aluminium specialist that went on to build more Dubois-designed superyachts than any other single yard, Genevieve, Mondango and Kokomo among them. It is a useful reminder that a design studio's and a shipyard's fortunes can be tied together from a single order, and that Dubois's influence on New Zealand's superyacht building industry runs well beyond his own drawing board.

Ed Dubois drew with a pencil and a spline, never a screen, and when he died in 2016 his own office could not outlive him for long: both Dubois Naval Architects and its sister brokerage are now formally dissolved, yet Timoneer was still cruising Maine in 2012 and Mondango was still alongside in Trieste in 2019, decades after he drew them.

Two Ketches Two Decades Apart: Genevieve to Mondango

Genevieve, built by Alloy Yachts in 1995 and 1996 to naval architecture and exterior design by Dubois with interiors by the American house Glade Johnson Design, is a 37m aluminium performance ocean cutter sleeping 8 to 9 guests in four staterooms. She won the fourth Dubois Cup in June 2013, a biennial regatta for Dubois-designed yachts that Ed Dubois himself helped start after a client's suggestion, with its first edition sailed in Palma in 2007 and later editions run out of Porto Cervo with the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda; this research found no confirmed edition after 2015, so whether it still runs today is unclear and should not be assumed.

Mondango followed in 2008, also from Alloy Yachts, a 51.77m aluminium ketch built to Lloyds Classification and the Large Commercial Yacht Code LY2, with naval architecture and exterior by Dubois and interiors by Reymond Langton. A larger sister, Mondango 3, a 56.4m ketch, later came from the same yard. A photograph taken in Trieste in August 2019, used on this page, shows the original Mondango still turning heads alongside more than a decade after delivery, her boom lettered with the yacht's name beneath the same wraparound deckhouse glazing Dubois had been drawing since Aquel II.

Owners Who Helped Draw Their Own Boats

Salperton IV, a 45m sloop launched by Fitzroy Yachts in New Zealand in 2009 with a Dubois exterior and naval architecture and an Adam Lay Studio interior, won the Showboats Design Award for Best Exterior Design and Styling among sailing yachts in 2010 and was a World Superyacht Awards finalist the same year. Fitzroy Yachts, the builder behind her, delivered its final yacht in 2014 and does not appear to be trading today either, so two of the six yards behind this page's fleet, Fitzroy and the original Dubois office itself, are now both gone.

Nostromo, a roughly 30m sloop delivered by the British yard Pendennis in 2009, came from an owner, the British industrialist Sir Andrew Cook, who was closely involved in her design. I helped to design Nostromo and incorporated everything I felt was necessary, he told BOAT International. It has been my karma. He also described modifying Dubois's original design directly: I made some quite significant modifications to one of his designs to turn something that was a nice yacht into what I believe to be a unique yacht. Her exterior was a collaboration between Dubois Naval Architects and Redman Whiteley Dixon, who also did the interior.

Kokomo and Twizzle: the Largest of the Line

Kokomo's 58.4m aluminium hull carries a 75m mast, a lifting ballast keel that raises to 5m and lowers to a draught of 8.05m, and what her builder described as the first submarine anchoring system fitted to a yacht, from the specialist Mason. Her exterior and naval architecture are credited to Dubois and her interior to Redman Whiteley Dixon, the same studio that worked on Nostromo. Charterworld reported her at the time as the largest sailing yacht built in New Zealand, a claim this research could not find independently contradicted.

Twizzle was Royal Huisman's first Dubois commission and its first flybridge sailing yacht, a 57.5m performance ketch pairing a swing keel inside a fixed 3.8m draught keel with motoryacht-level amenity, styled throughout by Redman Whiteley Dixon with interior decor by Todhunter Earle Associates. She launched on 8 July 2010 for a September delivery and is still described by her builder and by brokers as the largest ketch Dubois ever designed, a superlative that has stood for over fifteen years without, on this research, being beaten by a later Dubois hull.

Ngoni: Build Me a Beast

BOAT International reported that the owner's brief was blunt: Build me a beast. I don't want a wolf in sheep's clothing. Project manager Godfrey Cray told the magazine the owner wanted a sailor's superyacht and did not want to compromise on speed by adding more beam or a bunch of extra cabins. The result carries a Rondal carbon mast reported at 71 to 72 metres depending on the source, a stainless steel keel foil with a flattened torpedo bulb holding 73 tonnes of lead ballast and old-fashioned direct mechanical steering, by chain and quadrant, on a yacht of this size, together with a nearly 360-degree curved glass main deck.

Peter Bolke, a designer of 23 to 24 years at the Dubois office who became managing director on Ed Dubois's death, led the team that carried Ngoni's design through to her launch. In that sense the studio's last work was finished properly rather than orphaned. It is also, on the evidence this research found, the last confirmed yacht to leave the office carrying the Dubois name before the practice itself closed.

What Happened After Ed Dubois Died

Peter Bolke's statement on taking over promised continuity, naming one of the industry's most innovative 58m yachts currently in build, Ngoni, and a number of similarly ambitious projects in the design stage. That did not hold. Yachting World reported the liquidation on 23 February 2017, and the ten-lot Marriott and Co auction that followed included the company name, branding, design drawings and future royalty rights as its first lot, alongside the design rights to Ngoni herself, scale models and office furniture from the Lymington office. Malcolm McKeon, who had worked alongside Ed Dubois for thirty years until 2012, told the magazine simply that he was very sorry to hear the firm had gone into liquidation.

This research found no published report naming who won any lot in that auction, or what has been done with the name or the archive since. Companies House confirms both entities are now dissolved: Dubois Naval Architects Limited on 13 June 2020, and Dubois Yachts Limited, the sister company that managed sales and charter of the fleet, on 24 August 2018. Y.CO's website still lists Dubois Yachts among its featured design partners, describing it as founded in 1977 by the late Ed Dubois, but that reads as a historical reference to the name and the fleet rather than evidence of an active, currently trading design office, since no company by that name remains on the UK register.

Verify Before You Believe the Brokerage Copy

In researching this page, several widely repeated associations did not hold up. Adele, the 54.6m Vitters ketch often mentioned alongside Dubois's fleet, was designed by Hoek Design, not Dubois. Sea Eagle II, the 81m Royal Huisman sloop billed as the world's largest aluminium sailing yacht, was designed by Dykstra Naval Architects and Mark Whiteley Design. Ptarmigan, a 24.9m yacht sometimes listed alongside Dubois's fleet, was built by Nautor's Swan to a different design entirely, and Unfurled, the 46m Vitters sloop that won the 2016 Sailing Yacht of the Year award, was designed by German Frers.

None of this reflects badly on the real fleet, it just means the real fleet is smaller and more specific than a casual search suggests. A prospective buyer, broker or surveyor should confirm naval architecture credit against the builder's own record or a contemporary launch report rather than a listing site's category tag, exactly the check this research had to run hull by hull to write this page honestly.

Fees, Commissions and What Nobody Publishes

Even at the practice's peak, in the 2000s, no day rate, percentage fee or standard contract specific to Dubois was ever made public in the material this research reviewed. What is published is the fate of the company itself: liquidation in 2016, an asset auction in February 2017 and formal dissolution of both Dubois Naval Architects Limited and Dubois Yachts Limited by 2020. A buyer wanting a genuinely new yacht in this idiom has no office to call and needs to commission a different, currently trading studio instead.

For an existing owner, the harder question is who answers a classification society's query on a hull Dubois drew, or takes responsibility for a structural change on a refit. With the original naval architect's office dissolved, that responsibility falls to whichever yard or independent naval architect the current owner engages, and this research found no published guidance from any source on how the fleet's owners have handled that gap in practice.

Who Should Still Buy a Dubois

The strongest argument for this fleet is that it has kept working. Timoneer was still cruising the coast of Maine in 2012, more than a decade after her 2001 delivery. Mondango was still turning heads in Trieste in 2019, eleven years after hers. Genevieve was still winning regattas on an unpaid family crew in 2013, seventeen years after she was built. These are not museum pieces, they are yachts still doing the job Dubois designed them to do.

The honest caution is that the studio behind them is gone, and gone for good: Dubois Naval Architects Limited was dissolved in 2020, its brokerage arm in 2018, and nobody has published who now holds the name or the drawing archive. A buyer should treat any secondhand Dubois yacht as exactly that, secondhand, with refit, classification and structural questions to be answered by someone other than the office that originally drew the hull, and should independently verify the Dubois attribution itself before relying on it, since this research found more than one popular but incorrect claim already circulating.

Who it is for: Owners buying an existing, well-documented Dubois hull such as Timoneer, Mondango, Kokomo or Twizzle from a first-rank yard, not anyone hoping to commission a new yacht under the Dubois name, since the design office itself closed for good within a year of its founder's death and no successor studio has been confirmed.