Focus Yacht Design

A Bremen Advertising Agency That Became a Design Studio

The agency-to-yacht-studio route is unusual even in a discipline that already draws architects, engineers and stylists into the same room. Muhe has described the original team as a mix of backgrounds in architecture, design and advertising who found a shared interest in yacht design rather than a group of naval architects branching out, and the studio still runs from Osterdeich 59a in Bremen, on the river Weser a short drive from Abeking and Rasmussen's own yard. Krohn and Muhe are named as the practice's managing directors on its own registration; Schafer, a partner, has since become the studio's regular voice in trade press interviews.

The founding year produced a result a new studio rarely gets on its first try: Focus won an international tender for the exterior styling of six 75 metre yachts in 2007, its very first commission. Muhe has credited the win to a specific pitch, a semi-series production approach in which each owner would still feel they had a uniquely customised yacht through distinct design elements, an idea that reads now as an early version of the semi-custom thinking other yards later built whole ranges around. It also set the pattern for everything the studio has built since: German engineering-heavy yards, exterior work that reads as one family of yachts rather than one-off sculpture, and a habit of asking for the interior brief as well as the exterior one.

Two Survivors of a Six Yacht Order: Plan B and Odessa II

Plan B carries Focus Yacht Design's exterior styling and was the first of the pair to leave the yard, in 2012, sleeping up to 12 guests across eight cabins. Odessa II followed in 2013 for the Anglo-American businessman Leonid Blavatnik, named for his grandmother's hometown; Focus again drew the exterior, while the interior went to a separate practice, H2 Yacht Design. Both hulls trace back to the same original tender and share a family resemblance in profile even though the finished interiors, and in Odessa II's case the interior designer, differ.

For a studio's first flagship commission, surviving a cancelled five-sixths of the order and still delivering two 73 metre superyachts to a German yard is a harder result to fake than a rendering, and it is the reason Focus is still discussed alongside Nobiskrug's larger, better-known deliveries. What the record does not show is how the other four hulls were specified or how far along construction was before cancellation; this research found no source naming them or confirming any steel was cut on them.

Four of the six 75 metre yachts Focus Yacht Design was hired to draw in its founding year were cancelled by the financial crisis. The studio still delivered the other two, and went on to win a design competition against established rivals for its next flagship.

Soaring, Renamed Starlust: The First Job With the Yard Next Door

A&R invited Focus into a design competition rather than commissioning the studio directly, and Focus's exterior concept, styled with scalloped hull windows, an orange boot stripe and what the studio calls an eagle-beak bow, won the owner over. Thomas Muhe has said the brief called for an exterior that would not be mistaken for any other yacht on the horizon, and the finished hull, a grey-white, sporty profile built around a sweeping waterline line the studio says it had been developing for over a decade, delivered on it. The interior sleeps up to 12 guests in six cabins, with an owner's suite on the aft upper deck opening onto a private terrace and a lower-deck beach club with a spa, sauna and gym.

Jorg Kleymann, A&R's senior project manager on the build, has said working with Focus in German, the yard's own first language, was a new experience on a job of this scale, and that the trust between owner and yard let them build the boat in shorter time without losing quality. Daniel Kupfer of the brokerage Ocean Independence, which later listed the yacht for sale as Starlust, called her interior spacious and her finishing superb, and singled out A&R's noise control as a charter selling point. The asking price on that brokerage listing has been reported at roughly EUR 88 million, which values a five-year-old, delivered 68.2 metre yacht on the resale market rather than the cost of commissioning a new one.

The Yacht the Press Still Calls Skyfall Is Named Zenith

Andrea Vallicelli and Co drew Zenith's exterior, a fast-displacement hull with a Voith Linear Jet propulsion system and naval architecture credited to Mulder Design and Unique Yacht Design; Focus Yacht Design's role was the interior, pitched at the time as balancing the contemporary feel of Vallicelli's exterior with the richer decor the Staluppis were known to favour. Sunrise Yachts said the change of ownership mid-build came from the remarkable level of interest the project drew once renderings were released, and that another buyer made an offer for the first hull in what was meant to become a series.

This research found no independent report confirming the delivered interior matched the Focus brief as originally pitched, or a confirmed handover date beyond the 2017 launch reporting; two trade outlets confirm the Zenith name and the yard, but neither carries a delivery story naming the new owner or the finished interior credit in detail. Anyone quoting Focus Yacht Design's Skyfall interior should know the boat they mean is called Zenith, and that the studio's actual finished contribution to her is less independently documented than Plan B, Odessa II or Soaring.

A Three Partner Studio, Still Privately Held

The studio's own site lists a portfolio beyond its documented deliveries that leans heavily toward concept work: Invision, a dark-hulled yacht with a helicopter deck; the Scala Project; a 95 metre SWATH-hulled cruise concept called Ventana; and further unbuilt studies named Pallas, Irimari and Vela. A smaller, confirmed delivery sits between the concepts and the flagships: the Drettmann Explorer 24, a 24 metre explorer yacht built by Acico and launched in 2016, for which Focus drew the exterior. In 2025 the studio published two more concepts side by side under the names Unity and Gravity, both 52 metre, 500 GT designs sharing one hull form: Unity a nine metre beam semi-displacement sports version reaching 23 knots, Gravity a fast-displacement, quieter, more efficient version with a claimed range over 3,000 nautical miles at 16 knots. Neither has a named yard, price or confirmed build slot.

Away from concept renderings, Muhe has described the studio's actual working method as slow by design: owners on a real commission work with Focus over roughly three years on interior detail alone, down to tableware, against a running document the studio calls its black book, tracking specification and cost against the yard's own numbers. That is a meaningfully longer and more hands-on process than a buyer gets from an exterior-only styling house, and it lines up with the studio's insistence, going back to its founding pitch, that exterior and interior are drawn as one job rather than handed to two separate offices.

What a Commission Costs, and What Nobody Publishes

Nothing found in this research states what Plan B, Odessa II, Soaring or the Zenith interior actually cost to commission, and the studio's own site carries no pricing information at all. On contract structure and copyright, Focus publishes nothing specific either; the professional default across yacht design is that the design office retains ownership of the drawings and licenses the client one hull, which is worth an owner asking about directly in writing before assuming a second build or a heavy refit elsewhere is covered.

The studio's yard relationships are narrower and more traceable than its concept portfolio suggests: ADM Kiel and Nobiskrug for Plan B and Odessa II, Abeking and Rasmussen for Soaring/Starlust, Sunrise Yachts for the Zenith interior, and Acico, working for Drettmann, on the 24 metre explorer exterior. Commissioning runs through the Bremen office directly; there is no broker layer or agent network described anywhere in the studio's own material.

Who Should Call Bremen

The strongest argument for Focus is the survival story at its core: an office that won its first commission before it had a second project, watched four of six ordered hulls cancelled by a financial crisis, and still delivered two 73 metre superyachts, then went on to win a design competition against established rivals for Soaring and helped that yacht to an ISS award. Its own account of the interior process, three years of detail work down to tableware against a running cost document, matches what a demanding owner building a genuinely custom yacht should expect a studio to do, and Jorg Kleymann's account of the Soaring build backs it up from the yard's side rather than the studio's own marketing.

The honest caution is that the record thins out fast past those flagships. No staff count, no fee scale and no independent confirmation of the Zenith interior as delivered leave real gaps for anyone trying to size the studio before committing, and a portfolio otherwise built from unbuilt concept renderings, Invision, Ventana, Unity and Gravity among them, should be read as a design language on offer rather than a built track record. An owner who wants that combination of German-yard access and a slow, detail-heavy interior process has good reason to call Bremen. An owner who wants a large public archive of independently reported deliveries to check before signing will find less of it here than the real hulls suggest.

Who it is for: Owners already building, or planning to build, with a German or Turkish yard who want one studio responsible for the exterior profile and the full interior brief across a multi-year process, rather than an owner who wants a large, independently documented portfolio or a published price to start from.