Studio F. A. Porsche

The man who drew the 911

Ferdinand Alexander Porsche designed the original 911, a shape that has survived sixty years of redesign without ever losing its identity. He opened his own design office in 1972, in Stuttgart, and the design studio later settled at Zell am See in Austria. The company was renamed Studio F. A. Porsche in 2015 in tribute to him.

The office has never been a yacht practice. It designs watches, eyewear, writing instruments, electronics, furniture, buildings and vehicles, and it sells brand strategy alongside the drawing. Marine work is one strand. That is the first thing an owner should understand, and the studio does not pretend otherwise.

Who owns it, and what that means

The studio sits inside the Porsche group alongside the Porsche Design brand. It is not an independent atelier that happens to share a surname. A yard hiring it is entering a licensing and brand relationship as well as a design contract, and the badge on the boat is part of what is being bought.

The practical consequence for a buyer is a different kind of assurance from the one a yacht studio offers. A famous designer's yacht studio can go quiet if its founder retires. A corporate design house inside an industrial group will still be there, and it will still be applying the same guidelines. The trade is that a buyer has much less influence over the result, because the design language is defended as brand property.

The studio draws the helm console, the wheel and the throttle as products in their own right, which is normal in cars and rare on the water.

Reduction, applied to a boat

The studio's stated method is to strip an object back to essentials and let function set the shape, combining aesthetic clarity with intuitive functionality. On a boat that shows up as flat, disciplined surfaces, hard shoulder lines, purposeful air intakes and almost no applied decoration. Where an Italian studio would sculpt a curve, this office will resolve a chamfer.

It also shows up in things owners feel instead of see. The studio works on helm consoles, controls, seating and instrument layout as products in their own right, which is ordinary practice in car design and unusual in yacht design, where the dashboard is often whatever the equipment supplier shipped. Anyone who has stood at a badly laid out helm at night will understand why that matters.

Dynamiq GTT 115

The GTT 115 is a 35 metre fast motor yacht designed with the builder Dynamiq, with the project completed in 2017 and a run limited to seven hulls. She was listed from EUR 13.95 million at launch. The Porsche cues are explicit, from the paint options through the shape of the intakes to the treatment of the transom.

She was conceived for long, fast passages with genuine range and a hybrid propulsion option, and she was aimed at a buyer who wanted a defined product instead of a three year negotiation with a yard. A limited series carries a real advantage at resale, since a broker can point to a known specification and a known number of sisterships. It carries a real limitation too, in that the buyer inherits somebody else's general arrangement.

Royal Falcon One

Royal Falcon One is a 41.4 metre power catamaran delivered in 2019, with the exterior by the studio, the interior by the Dubai practice Greenline and naval architecture by the Australian catamaran specialists Incat Crowther. She is 492 GT, runs twin MTU diesels through waterjets and reaches 37 knots. She carries ten guests in five cabins, with the crew accommodated down in the hulls.

The exterior is the studio at its most literal, with visor-like glazing and an upper deck overhang that reads straight off a sports car. Inside, the main deck runs as one continuous volume from saloon to observation lounge with no bulkheads interrupting it, lit by fourteen colour-changing panels. A catamaran gives that kind of uninterrupted beam in a way a monohull of the same length cannot, which is the practical reason the layout works at all.

The Frauscher electric boats

The most current marine work is with the Austrian builder Frauscher. The 850 Fantom Air, premiered at boot Dusseldorf in January 2024, keeps the 8.67 metre hull of Frauscher's existing day cruiser almost unchanged and puts a Porsche electric powertrain into it, built from standard Macan Turbo components with a 100 kWh battery set under the lounge for trim. It carries up to nine people and exceeds 45 knots.

Studio F. A. Porsche drew the helm stand, the steering wheel and the main console with its throttle and integrated displays. The initial edition was set at 25 boats, built at Frauscher's yard in Ohlsdorf. This is the studio doing what it is genuinely best at, which is taking an existing well-engineered platform and resolving the parts a person actually touches.

What the studio is hired for, and what it is not

There is no naval architecture here and no in-house marine engineering. Hull form, structure, stability and systems belong to the builder or to an outside specialist, which on Royal Falcon One meant Incat Crowther. The studio contributes styling, product design and brand identity. Performance guarantees live entirely in the build contract.

The office also does not work the way a custom yacht studio works. It engages with builders to create defined models and limited series, and the buyer arrives after the design is fixed. An owner who wants a designer sitting opposite him for two years shaping a boat around his family will not find that arrangement here, and should not expect it.

How a boat gets bought, and what it costs

Because these are series products, the commercial path is closer to buying a car than commissioning a yacht. A buyer chooses a model, a specification, a paint scheme and an option list, signs with the builder and takes delivery on a stated date. The design fee is inside the boat price and is not separately negotiated, which removes an entire category of cost uncertainty and also removes any visibility. Neither the studio nor the builders disclose what the arrangement is worth, and there is no reason they would. Published naval architecture practice prices repeat hulls to one design at a royalty of roughly 1 to 1.5 per cent of each boat, which is the shape of a series deal even where the number here is unknown.

That structure also removes the largest source of overrun on a custom project, which is an owner changing his mind after engineering has started. On a private commission the comparable exposure is a designer's fee of 1 to 5 per cent of build cost plus 2 to 4 per cent for project management, both outside the yard's price, per the SuperYachtReview guide updated March 2026, and none of that appears here. Against it, a buyer pays a premium for the badge and the limited numbers, and it is a premium the market may or may not return. The honest test is whether the boat would still be the right one with a different name on it.

Standing, and who it does not suit

The studio's weight in yachting comes from its design heritage, not from volume. Very few names in any field carry the association the Porsche design lineage does, and a yard that brings it in acquires an identity it could not build in a decade. That is worth something at the marina and something at resale, though nobody should mistake it for the record of a marine specialist.

This studio does not suit an owner commissioning a large custom yacht from a blank sheet, and it has no portfolio above about 41 metres. It does not suit anyone who wants a warm, layered, decorated interior. Owners who want a single office accountable for both the look and the performance of a boat need a different structure entirely. For a buyer who wants a defined fast boat with an outside design culture, it is close to the only option of its kind.

A badge premium is paid new and rarely recovered

A yacht carrying this name sells no better than the boat underneath it, and on the evidence available it may sell worse than an equivalent hull from a marine brand. Two things work against it. The runs are tiny, seven boats in the case of the Dynamiq GTT 115, so there are almost no comparables and a valuer has little to work from. And a premium paid for a badge at the point of sale is a premium the second buyer has no reason to pay again, because he can buy the same badge at the same discount everyone else can. Ocean Independence, writing on 11 May 2026, lists builder pedigree, specification and condition as what holds value, and does not list design authorship at all.

The counterweight is that a defined production boat is a liquid asset in a way a one-off is not. There is a known specification, a known delivery date, a known price and, in the Frauscher case, a marque with a real service network behind it. That matters more at 8 to 12 metres than it does at 35, where the GTT 115 sits in a thin part of the market with a badge instead of a fleet. A buyer who wants the object should buy it and enjoy it. A buyer who is quietly counting on the name to protect the money should look at what the same money buys from a builder whose boats trade every week.

Who it is for: Buyers who want a limited-series fast boat with an outside design culture and a famous engineering lineage, on a fixed price and a fixed date.