RWD (Redman Whiteley Dixon)

Two industrial designers and a river

Justin Redman and Mark Whiteley met studying industrial design at the Central School of Art and Design in London and set up together in 1993. Industrial design is a useful starting point for this work, because it teaches a designer to think about how an object is made and used before deciding what it looks like. Tony Dixon joined and the practice became Redman Whiteley Dixon, which everybody shortens to RWD. Mark Whiteley has since left and runs his own studio under his own name.

The office sits in the restored Old Electric Light Station on the bank of the Beaulieu River in Hampshire, an hour and a half from London and five minutes from the water. The early work was sailing yacht interiors. Motor yachts and exteriors came later and now dominate. Roughly seventy-five yachts have been drawn there, spanning about 35 metres to 155.

Who runs it, and how big it has become

The partners today are Justin Redman, Tony Dixon and Toby Ecuyer. Ecuyer joined in 2004, was made creative director in 2006 and was brought into the partnership after a decade in the studio. That is a slow, internal succession, and it is worth noting because a number of the best-known names in this directory are single-designer practices with no succession at all.

The team has grown to around sixty people, having absorbed the interior house POD Interior Style as a sister company. For an owner that means the studio can take the interior architecture and the decoration as well as the profile. It also means a project is staffed properly. A four year build generates a volume of drawing revisions that a five-person office cannot absorb without something slipping.

Fourteen balconies and seven unfolding platforms in one hull, which is a watertight integrity problem long before it is a view.

What the studio actually draws

RWD is an exterior and interior practice. Naval architecture belongs to the yard or to a specialist office, which on the Feadships means De Voogt. The studio is equally willing to take one half of a boat, and its largest project by length is an interior sitting under somebody else's exterior. An owner appointing RWD is buying how the yacht looks and how it lives.

The visible signature is restraint in the profile combined with aggression about openings. The exteriors are calm, with balanced masses and lines that do not announce a particular decade. Then the hull is cut open. On Breakthrough the studio worked with Feadship to fit fourteen balconies and seven unfolding platforms, more openings than the yard had ever put in a hull. Every one of those is a structural and watertight-integrity problem before it is a view.

Al Said, and the inside of a state yacht

Al Said was delivered by Lurssen in 2008 at 155 metres as a state yacht for Oman. The exterior is by Espen Oeino. The interior is RWD, across six decks, including a concert hall sized for a fifty-piece orchestra, and the vessel is reported to accommodate around 70 guests with a crew of 154. She remains the largest project the studio has worked on.

A commission of that kind is a particular test. The client is an institution with a protocol brief, the spaces have ceremonial functions a private yacht never has, and the acoustics of a concert room on a moving steel hull are an engineering problem before they are a decorative one. Being handed the interior of that vessel, over an exterior by one of the strongest studios in the field, is a credential no award confers.

Breakthrough

Feadship launched the 118.8 metre Breakthrough, known through its build as Project 821, on 4 May 2024. She is the yard's largest yacht, the largest superyacht ever launched in the Netherlands, and at 7,247 GT she carries an enormous internal volume. Her power comes from a 3.2 megawatt fuel-cell system running on cryogenic liquid hydrogen stored at minus 253 degrees Celsius, with a hybrid arrangement that lets her fall back on conventional diesel-electric. Development took around five years.

RWD drew both the exterior and the interior. The design problem was to hide a very large volume behind a profile that does not read as a block, while accommodating hydrogen tanks that take up roughly the space of a conventional fuel system several times over. For an owner watching regulation tighten in Mediterranean and Northern European waters, the relevant point is that a design office has now taken a fuel-cell yacht from brief to launch. Nobody else has that on their books.

The Dutch and German order book

Feadship has been the closest relationship. Sophia, 96.55 metres, was delivered in 2017 under the name Faith with exterior and interior by the studio, and the 73.55 metre Sherpa followed in 2018. Destiny, at 101.2 metres, is listed for 2026. Vava II, 96 metres from the British yard Devonport in 2012, was drawn by RWD with the interior credited to Remi Tessier.

At Lurssen the studio has Al Said behind it, the 102.4 metre Nixie listed for 2026 and the 122.5 metre Project Omega with a delivery date well into the future. Benetti built the 108 metre I.J.E. in 2019. That spread across the three or four yards capable of building above 100 metres matters when an owner has already picked a builder, because it means the studio arrives knowing how that yard prices a change and how long its engineering department really needs.

The Benetti series, for owners who will not commission from nothing

RWD drew Benetti's B.Now range at 50, 60, 67 and 72 metres, and the smaller Oasis range at 34 and 40 metres. These are semi-custom platforms. The hull, the engineering and the general arrangement are largely settled before a buyer appears, and the yard builds them speculatively or against early orders.

What the buyer gives up is authorship of the profile, which will be shared with every other hull in the series. What he gets is a delivery measured in a year or two, a price fixed at contract and a boat with an established resale market, because brokers know exactly what a B.Now is worth. The Oasis range in particular put the studio's habit of opening the hull into production form, with fold-down beach club terraces as a standard feature.

How a commission runs, and what it costs

A project starts with conversations about how the owner and his family actually use a boat, because the studio's leverage is on layout and volume before it is on styling. Concept sketches and a general arrangement follow, then exterior and interior develop in parallel because one office holds both. The fee is staged against those deliverables and paid before the yard is contracted. What an owner buys at concept stage, for the smallest tranche of the total, is a package a yard can price, and the right to walk away holding drawings he has licensed. The commitment is the yacht building agreement, and the practical commitment is the day the yard starts engineering to these drawings.

There is no published fee scale. The market band for a designer, from the SuperYachtReview guide updated March 2026, is 1 to 5 per cent of build cost, with project management a separate 2 to 4 per cent, neither of them inside the yard's number. Exterior and interior together sit high in that band, and the studio's construction-phase involvement is normally an additional charge rather than part of the design fee, which is how the profession bills supervision. That charge is the one an owner should not negotiate away. Drawings get value-engineered on the shop floor, and the difference between a design that survives and one that quietly degrades is whether the designer is still in the room when the yard proposes a cheaper detail.

Recognition, and who it does not suit

RWD does not shout, and it has historically been quieter in the consumer press than more flamboyant houses. Within the industry the record speaks for itself, and the studio's work has been recognised repeatedly at the design awards. Awards are worth a narrow and real amount to an owner, because they confirm a finish standard and they help a broker at resale. They say nothing about behaviour under pressure.

This studio does not suit an owner who wants a profile nobody has seen before, because the work is deliberately calm and will disappoint anyone chasing spectacle. It does not do naval architecture, so an owner who wants hull form and styling from one firm needs a different structure. It is not the obvious choice for a sailing yacht today, whatever the studio's origins, and it is not set up for boats below about 30 metres outside the Benetti ranges.

Understatement is a resale strategy, whether or not it was meant as one

A yacht carrying this studio's name sells better than average, and the reason is the thing that disappoints owners looking for spectacle. Calm work does not date, so a buyer in 2035 is not looking at a boat that announces the year it was drawn. The second reason is structural. Benetti's B.Now and Oceans ranges put dozens of hulls to RWD lines into the brokerage market, and comparables are what valuations are made of. Ocean Independence, on 11 May 2026, ranks builder pedigree and specification above cosmetic detail in what holds value, and this studio's work is almost always attached to a Dutch, German or top Italian yard.

The honest deduction is that an owner is not paying a premium for a name the market rewards. He is paying for a hull that opens up, and the resale benefit is a consequence of restraint rather than of the signature. The one place it costs him is at the point of sale to a buyer who wants drama, and there are such buyers. A boat that photographs quietly gets fewer enquiries and better ones. Given a median 277 days on market across the 470 yachts of 24 metres and over sold in 2025, fewer and better is the right trade.

Who it is for: Owners building at a top Dutch, German or Italian yard who want an understated profile and are willing to pay for a hull that opens up.