Officina Italiana Design

A competition win in 1984

Mauro Micheli was born in 1959 in a village outside Bergamo, took his training at the art high school there and at the Brera Academy in Milan, and joined Riva in 1984 as a technical assistant after winning a competition. He spent a decade inside the yard before leaving to set up on his own. Sergio Beretta comes from Brescia with degrees in business and marketing and a master's in European law, and he began his career in aviation running European airport stations.

They founded Officina Italiana Design in Bergamo in 1994, and Riva appointed the new studio as its exclusive designer straight away. That is an unusual bet for a marque with that much history to place on a two-man office. It has held for more than thirty years. Micheli runs the design and Beretta runs the business, a split that has not changed since the first day.

One marque, contracted to 2030

The defining feature of this practice is that it has one client. Every Riva drawn since 1994 has come from this studio, and the exclusive agreement was renewed again in June 2024, signed at the historic Sarnico yard on Lake Iseo where Carlo Riva worked, with the Ferretti Group's chief executive present. The current term runs to 2030.

For a buyer this is a straightforward advantage. There is no design house standing between him and the yard with divided loyalties, and the people drawing the boat have thirty years of knowledge about how that particular yard builds. The corresponding limitation is that the studio's fortunes are bound to one marque and one group. It has chosen depth over breadth, and it has been paid for that choice repeatedly.

Fifty-four metres kept under 500 gross tons, so the boat runs with eleven crew instead of twenty.

Nine people

The team is around nine, including the two founders, a chief exterior designer, a chief interior designer appointed in 2024 and designers who have been there since the late 1990s. The office covers exterior design, interior design, industrial design, prototypes and refit and restoration work. Naval architecture is not offered.

On a Riva that gap is filled by the yard. Sairu, the 54 metre flagship, was developed with the Ferretti Group engineering department and the group's strategic product committee, which Piero Ferrari chairs. The studio's leverage sits on how the boat looks and how the spaces work. Hull form, systems and performance guarantees belong to the builder and appear in the sale contract.

What a Riva has to look like

The brief here is narrower than any other studio in this directory. A Riva has to be recognisable at 400 metres in poor light, and it has to look like it descends from the mahogany runabouts of the 1950s and 60s without becoming a costume. That means a low, taut profile, a long foredeck, a windscreen raked hard and a hull side that runs almost unbroken from stem to transom.

Micheli has described the job as carving an emotion instead of drawing a shape. The practical version of that is a refusal to break the sheerline, a very restricted palette of hull colours and an obsession with the reflection along the topsides, which is why Riva hulls are faired and painted to a standard that costs real money. An owner is paying for the absence of visual noise. That is harder to sell and harder to build than adding features.

The small boats, which are the hardest

The runabout end of the range is where the marque's identity is decided. The Aquariva carries the mahogany, chrome and cream leather vocabulary directly into a modern GRP boat, and it is the model most people picture when the name is mentioned. These are boats measured in feet, not metres, and they are bought as objects.

They also set an unforgiving standard. On a nine metre boat every fitting is visible, every joint is at eye level and nothing can be hidden behind a bulkhead. A studio that details at that level and then scales the same discipline to 54 metres will not leave a lazy junction anywhere on the bigger boat. Owners moving up through the range notice the continuity, which is precisely the point of a single design hand.

Going large: Race, Bellissima and the 54

Riva was a small-boat marque for most of its history and has moved decisively upmarket in the last decade. Race, the first Riva 50 Metri, launched in 2019 at 49.9 metres with the exterior and interior from the studio working alongside Riva's own team. The 130 Bellissima, at around 40 metres, became the flagship of the flybridge range. The 102 Corsaro sits below it at 31 metres.

Sairu, the first Riva 54Metri, was launched at Ancona on 7 August 2025 and is the largest boat the yard has ever built. She is all aluminium, 54 metres on an 8.60 metre beam, with over 370 square metres of outdoor deck, a five metre pool in the beach area aft and a transformer platform giving on to it. She carries ten guests and eleven crew. Her lines are softer than Race's, which is the studio moving the language on instead of repeating it.

Under 500 GT, and why that matters

Sairu is 54 metres and stays under 500 gross tons. That is not an accident and it is the single most useful fact about her for a prospective owner. Below the 500 GT line the regulatory regime, the certification burden and the required crewing are materially lighter, which is why she runs with eleven crew instead of the twenty a comparable length would otherwise need.

Designing a 54 metre that stays under the line while still feeling like a large yacht is a volume problem before it is an aesthetic one. Every cubic metre enclosed counts against the total, which forces decisions about superstructure height, overhangs and enclosed versus open deck. Most of the studio's cleverness on this boat is invisible in photographs. It appears in the annual running cost.

How a boat gets bought, and what it costs

These are yard models, so the commercial path runs through Riva and the Ferretti Group rather than through a design contract with the studio. A buyer selects a model and a specification, negotiates layout and finish inside the limits the platform allows, and takes delivery on a stated date. The design fee is inside the boat price. The studio is retained by the group under an exclusivity that was renewed in June 2024 and runs to 2030, which reads as a retained relationship rather than the per-hull royalty of roughly 1 to 1.5 per cent that published naval architecture practice applies to repeat builds. Neither the terms nor any royalty are disclosed, and no buyer will ever see either.

What that arrangement buys a buyer is the absence of the numbers everyone else in this directory has to plan for. There is no separate designer's fee of 1 to 5 per cent of build cost and no project management at 2 to 4 per cent, the two lines the SuperYachtReview guide of March 2026 puts outside a yard's quoted price on a custom project. The largest boats are still built to order and take a year or more from contract, with the 54 Metri programme longer. What a buyer gives up is authorship. What he gets is a price fixed at signature and a delivery date the yard can meet.

Standing, and who it does not suit

The studio's reputation rests entirely on keeping a legend both current and recognisable across three decades and a range that now spans from small runabouts to 54 metres. That is a rarer skill than starting from a blank sheet and it is judged in public every time a new model launches. The repeated contract renewals are a better signal than any award, because they are commercial decisions taken by a listed group.

This studio does not suit an owner who wants a custom yacht drawn around him, because it does not take private commissions outside the marque. It does not suit anyone who wants an unfamiliar profile, since the whole exercise is continuity. Buyers who want maximum volume for their length should look at almost anything else, as a Riva spends its length on line and stance. It is not the place for a displacement explorer or a sailing yacht.

The strongest resale position in this directory

A Riva sells better than almost anything else of its size, and the reason is unglamorous. The market knows exactly what the boat is. Model designations, standard specifications and a continuous production history give brokers and valuers a dense set of comparables, and a valuation built from comparables is the one buyers argue with least. Ocean Independence, on 11 May 2026, puts builder pedigree, specification and condition at the top of what holds value, and a marque with an unbroken line and a factory service network scores on every count. The classic boats make the point at the other end of the timeline, where restored examples trade as collectable objects rather than as used yachts.

The cost is real and it is paid in volume. A Riva spends its length on line and stance, so a buyer comparing interior space against a flybridge boat of the same length will find less of it, and that gap does not close at resale. The continuity that protects value also caps the upside, because a boat that is recognisably part of a line cannot surprise the market in either direction. For an owner who wants a known asset with a predictable exit, that is the point. For one who wants his boat to be the only one of its kind, this is the wrong marque entirely.

Who it is for: Buyers who want the Riva marque and its unmistakable line, and will trade authorship for a fixed price, a real delivery date and a strong resale market.