Winch Design

The Caribbean, then six years with Bannenberg

Winch took a foundation course at Central Saint Martins and then studied three-dimensional design at Kingston School of Art. He left the studio for the sea and spent a period skippering yachts in the Caribbean, which is an unusual line on the CV of a designer who now works at 150 metres. He came back to a six-year apprenticeship with Jon Bannenberg, the man generally credited with inventing modern yacht design. Terence Disdale and Tim Heywood came through the same office in the same era.

He set up on his own in 1986 with his wife Jane. The first job was the complete interior and exterior of a 36 foot Swan sailing yacht, which is roughly a quarter the length of the tender on some of the boats the studio now draws. The practice was renamed Winch Design in 2015 as the aviation and architecture work grew past the point where one man's name covered it. Jane Winch has run the business alongside her husband since the beginning.

A studio the staff own

Winch Design became fully employee-owned in July 2021, with Andrew Winch joining the trustee board. That answers a question an owner should ask any design house before signing a four year build, which is what happens to the studio if the founder stops coming in. Several of the practices in this directory have no succession at all. This one has been structured so the answer does not depend on one man.

The office moved in 2024 to Parklife House on Deodar Road in Putney, after 26 years spread across the old fire station in Barnes and a growing collection of neighbouring buildings. More than 150 people now work there across yacht design, aviation, architecture, visualisation and procurement. The aviation studio dates from 2002 and the architecture studio from 2007. In 2024 the studio said it had 33 projects in build, fifteen of them yachts.

The studio was handed to its own staff in 2021, which answers the question every owner should ask before signing a four year build.

Exterior and interior from one office

The practical distinction between Winch and most of its British peers is scope. Tim Heywood draws exteriors only. Reymond Langton is best known for interiors. Winch takes both on the same hull and does so on yachts above 100 metres, where the coordination problem is at its worst.

The saving is not mainly in fees. It is in the months of a build otherwise spent reconciling two sets of drawings where a window line meets a deck edge, or where an interior stair wants a metre the superstructure has already spent. On projects where another studio has drawn the outside, the division is clean and long-established. Al Mirqab, the 133 metre delivered from the German yard at Wewelsfleth in 2008, carried a Tim Heywood exterior over a Winch interior and took Motor Yacht of the Year at the World Superyacht Awards in 2009.

The Feadships

Madame Gu was delivered by Feadship in 2013 at 99 metres, with De Voogt naval architecture and both the exterior and the interior by Winch. She is a hard, formal profile with a lot of glass and a very upright bearing, and she remains the studio's best-known single exterior. Sea Owl followed from the same yard the same year at 62 metres, again with exterior, interior and decoration all from the studio.

Sea Owl is the more revealing of the two. She is built around a family narrative carried into carved panelling, painted detail and a hand-worked staircase, and Winch has described her as one of the most complex projects he has handled. Complexity of that kind is expensive in a way owners consistently underestimate, because every bespoke element is a separate commission with its own maker and its own lead time. A studio with an in-house procurement team exists precisely to keep that from derailing a delivery date.

The very large interiors

Dilbar came out of Lurssen in 2016 at 156 metres with an Espen Oeino exterior and a Winch interior. She has the greatest interior volume of any yacht ever delivered, at 15,917 GT, which means the studio was decorating a building the size of a small hotel with 96 crew running it. Alaiya, 111.5 metres from Lurssen in 2019 and launched as Tis, is a full Winch project inside and out, drawn to evoke the yachting of the early 1900s.

Work at that scale is a different discipline from a 60 metre. Volume alone will not make a room feel good, and a saloon of the wrong proportion reads as a lobby no matter what goes into it. The studio's habit of starting each scheme from a single idea, a place or a period or a colour, is partly a way of holding an interior together across seven decks. It also gives an owner something to push back against at concept stage instead of at the joinery mock-up.

Sail, which the studio never left

The office began on a sailing yacht and has kept the discipline. Winch drew the original interior for Hetairos, the 42.8 metre mahogany ketch built by Abeking and Rasmussen in 1993 to a Bruce King design and now sailing as Asgard. She is the longest mahogany yacht in the world and took 662 working days to build. Her interior was later reworked in a 2014 refit by Rhoades Young Design, whose principal had been the Winch project manager on the original build.

The studio is still taking sail seriously. Sky, revealed with Royal Huisman in November 2025, is an 81 metre sloop with naval architecture and exterior by Malcolm McKeon Yacht Design and the interior by Winch, an aluminium hull with a lift keel and a carbon Rondal rig standing around 93 metres. It would be the tallest sloop rig in the world. It is a design ready to build and had not been commissioned when it was announced, with a delivery estimate of 2030 for whoever orders it.

One hand across yacht, jet and house

The aviation studio has been running since 2002 and has produced cabin work for narrow-body and wide-body private conversions, including a Boeing 787 concept developed with Lufthansa Technik. The architecture studio, from 2007, does houses and estates. An owner who is fitting out an aircraft, building a house and commissioning a yacht within the same five years can run all three through one office.

The value in that is real but narrow. It gets an owner a consistent result without briefing three sets of strangers on his taste, his family and his security requirements, which is a conversation most people at this level would rather have once. It does not make any individual discipline cheaper. Owners who want the best available yacht studio and the best available aviation studio, and do not mind that they will not match, should appoint separately.

How a commission runs, and what it actually costs

The method leans on a long opening conversation to find the story the scheme will hang on. That sounds soft and is not. A theme fixed early gives every later decision a test to pass, and it is the mechanism by which a studio of 150 people produces work that still feels like one person made it. Commercially it runs in stages: concept, then design development, then detailing, procurement and site support, each with its own fee and each a place where an owner can stop. The concept stage is the cheap one and it is the one that decides everything, which is the wrong way round for most people's instincts about where to spend attention.

Nobody in this trade publishes a percentage, so the useful number comes from the market guides. SuperYachtReview, updated March 2026, puts the designer's fee at 1 to 5 per cent of build cost and project management at 2 to 4 per cent, both outside the yard's price. A full mandate of this kind, exterior and interior from one office with in-house materials, lighting, art and procurement, sits at the top of that band rather than the bottom, because it is four disciplines under one fee. On a EUR 150 million build the arithmetic is EUR 1.5 million to EUR 7.5 million. Against that, the larger exposure is changes, because every owner revision after the yard has begun engineering is paid for twice, once in drawings and once in yard time.

Recognition, and who it does not suit

Andrew Winch received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the BOAT Design and Innovation Awards in Kitzbuhel on 1 February 2026, and the studio's yachts have taken World Superyacht Awards across three decades, including for Al Mirqab, Madame Gu and Sea Owl. Awards are a useful filter for a buyer and a modest help at resale. They confirm a boat was finished to a standard specialists would defend in public. They say nothing about how a studio behaves in month thirty of a build.

This studio does not suit an owner who wants a small office where the founder does every drawing himself. It is not the obvious choice for a stripped-back minimalist interior, because the work runs richer and more detailed than that. Owners buying a semi-custom hull with a fixed layout will find much of what the studio is good at unavailable to them. Anyone whose main concern is a fast delivery should note that this kind of interior is slow by construction.

Does a Winch interior sell the boat, or the next owner's refit

Both, and it matters which part. The name on the listing helps. It tells a buyer the boat was finished to a standard specialists would defend, and brokers use it. The interior itself is the problem. A narrative-led scheme is authored for one family, and the more successfully it is authored the more specifically it fits them. The second owner inherits a theme he did not choose, executed in materials that are expensive to alter and were never meant to be neutral. Ocean Independence noted on 11 May 2026 that the market does not usually give back the full cost of refit spending, which is the cold way of saying the first owner pays for the interior twice, once to build it and once in the discount when it is sold.

This is not an argument against commissioning one. It is an argument for knowing which decisions are reversible. Joinery, stone and lighting can be replaced. Deck heights, window lines, the position of a lift shaft and the volume given to a beach club cannot, and those are the parts of a Winch scheme that will still be earning their keep for the third owner. An owner who expects to sell inside ten years should push the studio hard on layout and keep the surfaces calmer than the mood boards want. An owner who intends to keep the boat should ignore that advice entirely, because a strongly authored interior is worth more to the person living in it than the discount will ever cost him.

Who it is for: Owners who want a detailed, narrative-led interior and the exterior from the same office, and who may also want the jet and the house to match.