Guido de Groot Design

From Citroen to Feadship

De Groot holds a Bachelor of Science with honours from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where his graduation project was a Citroen off-road sports car, and he went on to spend around seven years as a car designer for Citroen in Paris. That automotive grounding, shared with several other yacht exterior designers, shows up in the surfacing on his later hulls.

The studio's own account of how he moved into yachts is not entirely consistent across its own materials: one essay on the studio's site dates a formative 1985 meeting with Biep de Vries of the De Vries Feadship yard, a Boat International interview instead describes seeing the Feadship Highlander nearing completion around age 20, and a third interview says simply that he met the owner of one of the Feadship yards while on holiday. These are not necessarily contradictory, since more than one encounter could have happened over the same period, but the studio's own telling of its origin story has never been pinned to one version.

Establishing the Studio in Leiden

Guido de Groot Design employs eight designers of varying nationalities, by its own account, from a three storey office at Hogewoerd 122 in Leiden that it has occupied since 1999. That is a small, stable operation by superyacht studio standards, and it has stayed that size through nearly three decades of work.

His first commercial commission was a speculative 15 metre design pitched to Mulder Shipyard. The studio's own site describes that relationship growing into more than fifty vessels over time, a figure that comes from de Groot's own materials rather than an independent count, but it is consistent with the long run of semi-custom Mulder, Van der Valk and Mengi-Yay work that appears across his portfolio.

Guido de Groot has said it for three decades in almost the same words: a yacht is always too small, no matter how long it is. Kathleen Anne is what happens when a studio actually listens to that and still stops at 39 metres.

Katrion, and a Hull That Kept Changing Its Name

Katrion was delivered by Feadship's De Vries yard in 1997 and marked de Groot's arrival as an exterior designer working at Feadship scale rather than on semi-custom Dutch production boats. She has changed names repeatedly since, a common pattern for yachts that resell more than once: Feadship's own fleet and resale pages record her, across various points, as Noi VII, Noah VII, Noa VII, Carolina and Gitana, and she is currently listed as Tasia.

That renaming chain is worth knowing before reading anything else about the studio, because a search for any one of those names will turn up the same hull under a different identity. It is a separate vessel from a 1989, 36 metre Perini Navi sailing yacht, also called Gitana at one point, whose interior de Groot refitted together with Ralph Lauren in 2015; the two boats share a name by coincidence at different points in time, not a connection. For a buyer trying to research either boat independently, the practical lesson is to confirm the builder and delivery year before trusting a name alone, since a Feadship search under any single one of Katrion's later names will miss most of her published history.

Kathleen Anne, and What the Owner Actually Wanted

Kathleen Anne's exterior is credited jointly to Studio De Voogt and Guido de Groot Design, with the interior by a separate studio, Bannenberg and Rowell Design, and naval architecture by De Voogt Naval Architects, Feadship's in-house team. Owner Alasdair Locke told Boat International the brief was to use the boat as a floating holiday home, deliberately not an enormous vessel, because size limits where a boat can actually go.

Locke also recalled being told by then Feadship chief executive Henk de Vries that his previous, smaller Feadship had been the most expensive boat the yard built per metre at the time, but that as his family grew it had become too small. That is a genuine owner account of the real economics of yacht size, rather than a styling anecdote, and it frames why Kathleen Anne was built to the specific, moderate size she is.

Diamond, and an Award-Winning Interior

Diamond's naval architecture and exterior integration were by Marco Arnaboldi, with de Groot responsible for the interior, which went on to win the ShowBoats Design Award in 2013. It remains the clearest independent, juried recognition in the studio's record, rather than a self-reported claim.

Espresso, a 37.2 metre Horizon Yachts interior delivered in 2009, is the other confirmed large-scale interior credit found for the studio, alongside a longer run of semi-custom exterior work for Timmerman, Mengi-Yay, Mulder, Van der Valk and Cerri Cantieri Navali, mostly under 35 metres.

What the Studio Does Not Have

The Feadship record is real and well documented: Katrion and Kathleen Anne both carry verifiable Feadship exterior credits. The Heesen connection, by contrast, is limited to a 24 metre chase boat, built with Vanquish Yachts and Studio Delta naval architects, for the owner of Heesen's Project SkyFall, later launched as Ultra G. That is a tender to a Heesen yacht, not a Heesen mothership.

The Amels connection is an interior concept study for the Amels 60 platform, one of three named concepts commissioned from different designers, with no evidence any hull was actually built to it. A reader comparing studios on the strength of yard relationships should weigh the Feadship credential heavily and discount the Heesen and Amels ones until a delivered hull surfaces.

A Recurring Admission About Scale

De Groot has put the same observation in more than one interview: a yacht is always too small, no matter how long it is, and a boat that starts a design process at 30 metres often finishes it at 35. That is not framed as a complaint about clients, but as a recurring, structural underestimate of how much space a real brief needs once it is drawn out in full.

He has separately named his hardest single project as a 32 metre yacht built in Russia in under a year, in 2003, at a yard that had never built a modern yacht before, an acknowledgment of shipyard-capability risk rather than a design problem. Both admissions are useful for a buyer to weigh: this is a designer whose own account of the work includes real, named difficulty, not just finished photography. It is also a useful prompt for a first conversation with the studio: asking directly how much larger a given brief is likely to grow before steel or aluminium is cut may be the single most practical question an owner can put to Guido de Groot before signing anything.

What a Commission Costs

No interview, press piece or company material discloses a Guido de Groot-specific day rate, commission percentage or fee structure, despite the studio's three decades of work. That should be stated to a reader plainly rather than estimated.

SuperYachtReview's 2026 cost guide puts superyacht designer fees at roughly 1 to 5 per cent of build cost as a general industry benchmark, with project management a separate 2 to 4 per cent. Other, less authoritative sources cite design-phase costs as high as 10 to 20 per cent of total build, rising further for highly customised projects; these are market context, not de Groot-specific pricing.

Who Should Commission This Studio

The studio's genuine strength is restrained, livable exteriors and interiors sized to how a family actually uses a boat, evidenced by Kathleen Anne's brief and by de Groot's own repeated warning that owners consistently underestimate the space they need. Diamond's ShowBoats award is the clearest independent proof the studio's interior work holds up under outside judgment, not just its own portfolio pages.

An owner chasing a Heesen or Amels flagship credential, or wanting a single studio to carry naval architecture as well as styling, should look elsewhere: neither is part of this studio's verified record. An owner planning something closer to Kathleen Anne's scale and brief, or a semi-custom Mulder or Van der Valk build, is exactly who this office has spent thirty years serving.

Para quién es: Owners planning a restrained, liveable family yacht in the Feadship tradition, or a semi-custom Dutch or Turkish build under 40 metres.