Vripack

Sneek, 1961

Dick Boon grew up in Sneek, learned to sail on a vegetable barge and spent his childhood sketching hulls. He worked at the Amsterdam Drydock Company and ran a sailing school before starting his own practice in 1961. The studio has been in Friesland ever since, a long way from Monaco and Fort Lauderdale.

Boon's principle from the first year was that every element of a boat should be drawn under one roof with the owner's experience as the reference point. That is still the studio's structure. It also explains why Vripack sits awkwardly in most directories, since it is neither a pure styling house nor a pure engineering office.

The man who invented the expedition yacht

Boon began the Doggersbank line in 1968, named for the North Sea fishing bank. These were rugged, slow, enormously seaworthy motor yachts built to cross oceans at a time when a private boat was expected to stay in sight of a coast. The 1977 Doggersbank 1525 introduced a composite hull to the range. The 1985 Doggersbank Offshore took the line international.

Boon is widely credited as the father of the expedition yacht, and the category he opened is now one of the fastest growing parts of the market. An owner buying an explorer today is buying an idea Vripack was selling fifty years before it became fashionable. The studio has never stopped drawing them. That continuity is worth something when a boat is meant to go somewhere cold.

Sixty five years in a Frisian town, and the studio that named the expedition yacht is now launching one that carries no fuel.

What the studio is now

Around forty designers, engineers and naval architects work from the Sneek studio, led by co-creative directors Bart M. Bouwhuis and Marnix J. Hoekstra. The library runs to more than eight thousand projects by the studio's own count, covering superyachts, commercial vessels, tenders and production boats. Very little of that work is famous. Much of it is the quiet engineering that keeps a yard on schedule.

The office was an early adopter of computer aided design and later of CNC files sent straight to the builder, which is the reason a small Dutch studio has been able to service yards in several countries. For an owner, the practical effect is that one firm can take a project from first sketch to production files. There is no handover between a designer who drew it and an engineer who has to make it work.

Al Waab and the 500 GT line

Al Waab, 55 metres, was delivered by Alia Yachts in Antalya in 2021 after two years of construction. The interesting number is not her length. Vripack kept her below 500 GT, which is the threshold above which crewing, certification and operating obligations step up sharply.

Fifty five metres under 500 GT is difficult and it is the sort of problem a studio with naval architects in the building can actually solve. The boat won several awards and a sister, Al Waab II, followed. For an owner the payoff is a yacht that looks and feels like a 55 metre and runs on a smaller crew with a lighter regulatory load. That difference shows up in the annual budget every year of ownership.

Special One, and briefs nobody else wants

Special One, 52 metres, was delivered by Royal Huisman in 2024 and is the largest true sportfishing yacht ever built. She has six decks and is built in Alustar aluminium to keep weight down. She debuted at the Monaco Yacht Show in 2024.

A sportfisher at that size is not a scaled up version of anything. The fishing cockpit, the tower, the weight distribution and the speed required all pull against the volume an owner expects at 52 metres. Vripack has a long record of taking briefs that do not fit an existing category and making them work. Owners with an unusual requirement tend to arrive here after being told elsewhere that it cannot be done.

Project Zero

Project Zero is a 68.9 metre sailing yacht built by Vitters at Zwartsluis, launched on 10 July 2026 and designed to operate without fossil fuel. Vripack drew the exterior and the interior. Dykstra Naval Architects handled the technical hull design and Emirates Team New Zealand refined the hull performance. Foundation Zero commissioned the boat and is publishing the technical data openly.

She carries around 100 square metres of photovoltaic thermal panels on her biminis, regenerates electricity through her propellers while she is sailing and runs everything off a 700 volt direct current grid. The stated target is up to two weeks of cruising on renewable energy alone. Seven years of development and more than 60,000 hours of research went into her. She is at sea trials as of July 2026, and whatever she proves will be public.

How an owner works with the studio

Vripack starts from how an owner intends to live on the water and works back to the boat. The studio then produces the exterior, the general arrangement, the interior and the naval architecture, and can carry through to the engineering and production files the yard builds from. On a custom project of 50 metres and above the design and engineering phase runs to many months before steel or aluminium is cut.

The single point of responsibility is the difference. On most projects an owner appoints an exterior designer, an interior designer and a naval architect and then spends four years reconciling three sets of drawings. Here that sits with one office. The owner still needs an independent build supervisor, because a designer carrying the engineering is not the right party to police the yard.

What it costs, and where the studio stops

Because Vripack sells more scope than a styling studio, its fee covers more and is quoted differently. Design work is charged against stages, with engineering and production drawings priced by the volume of work the yard actually needs, which is closer to how naval architecture has always been billed than to a percentage of a boat nobody has priced yet. The published scales in the profession run from 4 to 7 per cent of finished cost at Marsh Design to 10 to 12 per cent on a fixed commission at Kasten Marine, both read 28 July 2026, and both at small craft size. At superyacht scale the SuperYachtReview guide of March 2026 puts a designer at 1 to 5 per cent of build cost with project management a separate 2 to 4 per cent.

The number to hold on to is that a single appointment here displaces fees an owner would otherwise pay to two or three firms, and it removes the interfaces between them. What it does not displace is supervision. The studio does not build and does not supervise construction on the owner's behalf, and it does not run the classification process, which belongs to the yard and the society. The design contract and the build contract are separate documents with separate remedies, and an owner should read what the studio has actually warranted before assuming that a performance figure in a brochure is a promise somebody has signed.

Recognition, and who it does not suit

Vripack has taken superyacht design awards through the 2010s and 2020s, and Al Waab collected several after her 2021 delivery. Boon's standing as the originator of the expedition yacht is the more durable credential. Awards move a boat at resale by a small margin and tell an owner that specialists would defend the work.

This studio does not suit an owner who wants a fashion statement or a name that impresses at a Monaco dinner, since the practice is deliberately low profile. It has not worked much above 70 metres in recent years, so an owner commissioning at 100 metres will find deeper portfolios elsewhere. Anyone whose brief is a conventional Mediterranean flybridge boat is also over-served here, because the studio's value shows up on the difficult jobs.

Under 500 GT is a resale feature, not a design opinion

A Vripack boat sells on things that survive a change of taste, which is a rarer quality than it sounds. A hull kept below 500 GT carries a lighter regulatory and crewing burden for whoever owns it, and that shows up in an operating budget every year rather than in a photograph. Expedition capability is the same kind of asset. Range, tankage, tender handling and the ability to leave the Mediterranean are capabilities a second owner either wants or does not, and if he does, there are not many boats that have them. The design is not asking him to share an aesthetic. It is offering him a specification.

The offsetting weakness is the shallow buyer pool at the top of the studio's range and the absence of a name that impresses at a Monaco dinner. Ocean Independence, on 11 May 2026, puts builder pedigree and specification ahead of cosmetic detail in what holds value, which favours this work, but a boat with an unusual brief still needs the buyer who had that brief. Special One, the largest sportfishing yacht built, is the extreme case: a superb object with a buyer pool that could be listed on one page. An owner with an awkward brief should commission it and should plan to keep it.

Who it is for: Owners with an awkward brief, an expedition programme or a gross tonnage limit, who want design and engineering from a single office.