ER Yacht Design's Untouchable is 110m, 8,500nm, and no yard yet

A gentleman's yacht drawn at megayacht scale

On 6 August, Vancouver-based ER Yacht Design published a new 110-metre concept it calls Untouchable, founder Ivan Erdevicki's answer to what a modern gentleman's yacht looks like once the length passes three figures. The brief is restraint rather than spectacle: long horizontal lines, sweeping deck overhangs and floor-to-ceiling glazing on the principal guest decks, aimed at blurring where the interior stops and the sea begins. Erdevicki has built a career on the opposite instinct elsewhere - his signature swept winged masts on earlier designs are anything but restrained - so a calm, quiet 110-metre reads as a deliberate departure, not a default style.

The numbers are conventional for the size: a steel hull under an aluminium superstructure, 17 metres of beam and a 4.4-metre draft, all figures a yard could quote against today without inventing a new build method. That matters more than it sounds. A concept that needs a material or a process that does not exist yet is a thought experiment; one drawn in steel and aluminium, at proportions a European yard already knows how to cut, is a yacht someone could actually order. Erdevicki put it plainly at the unveiling: "With Untouchable, we wanted to create a yacht that does not depend on fashion or visual tricks. Her character comes from proportion, surface, and the way each deck flows into the next. She is powerful but calm - and the longer you look, the more detail you discover."

A beach club that opens into the sea

The feature ER Yacht Design is leading with is the aft waterfront: a multi-level beach club built around a swimming pool set into the upper terrace, with large hull-side sections that fold down to extend the usable platform out over the water. Lowered, they turn the stern into a continuous swim step running the width of the yacht, open laterally to the sea for swimming, sunbathing, tender pick-up and water toys at once, rather than the single transom door most 100-metre-plus yachts still rely on.

A forward retreat balances it: an expansive private foredeck, away from the guest traffic of the beach club, and a full helideck with its own refuelling and defuelling systems set apart from the accommodation. For an owner who splits a season between anchoring off a beach and flying guests in and out for weekends, the layout puts the two loudest, busiest functions on a 110-metre - swimming and helicopter operations - at opposite ends of the yacht, each running without disturbing the other.

The engineering behind the calm

Untouchable's propulsion is hybrid diesel-electric on a conventional shaft line, with controllable-pitch propellers and a Promas integrated propeller-and-rudder system, plus power take-in/power take-off electric drive that lets the yacht run on batteries alone at low speed. None of it is exotic: Feadship and Heesen already fit variants of the same architecture to yachts now in build, so the studio is proposing an established drivetrain rather than betting the concept on unproven technology.

The payoff is the pairing of a genuine 17-knot cruising speed with more than 8,500 nautical miles of range - enough to cross the Atlantic and continue on to a second ocean without refuelling, not a slow-displacement number chosen because it looks good on a spec sheet nobody expects an owner to actually run. Electric drive at anchor or on short hops also means the beach club and foredeck retreat can both be used with the generators off, the quieter, lower-vibration case the interior brief of light woods, ivory textiles and stone surfaces is clearly written for.

A studio that has put a yacht in the water before

ER Yacht Design's credibility on a concept this size rests on one prior credit: Project Gotham, a 46-metre Erdevicki drew for Icon Yachts in the Netherlands on a hull by Van Oossanen naval architects. It is a small yacht next to a 110-metre concept, but it is a real one, built by a yard with its own engineering department rather than existing only as a render - proof the firm's lines can survive contact with a naval architect and a build contract, which most concept-only studios cannot show.

The firm has form beyond Gotham too: a 65-metre project once intended for a Monaco Yacht Show unveiling, and a run of concepts, Untouchable included, that lean on one striking signature move over a full technical package - swept masts on one design, a swimming beach club on this one. That is a design studio's usual position relative to a yard: it sells the idea, and someone else has to sign for the steel. Erdevicki has described the studio's wider approach as stepping away from typical yacht-design cliches in favour of statements that are, in his words, different and meaningful in both design and technology - a line that applies as much to the swept masts of his earlier work as to a beach club that opens sideways into the sea.

What is not yet real

No yard is named. No owner is attached. No price exists, because nothing has been costed - a 110-metre custom build at this specification would run into the hundreds of millions of euros once a yard actually engineers it, and Untouchable has not reached that stage. Guest capacity, cabin count, crew size and gross tonnage are all absent from the release, which is normal for a first-look concept but means none of the usual comparison points against a yacht already on order - a Lurssen, an Oceanco, a Feadship of similar length - can be made yet.

The speed, range, beam and draft figures are ER Yacht Design's own, published without an independent naval architect or classification society attached to verify them; at the concept stage that is standard practice, not a red flag, but it is also why modern gentleman's yacht should be read as a mood the studio is selling rather than a spec anyone has committed to. Whether Untouchable becomes a real order depends on the one thing this release does not contain: a buyer willing to put a yard's name against it.