Feadship's biggest beach club yet shows where the money goes on an 80-metre

The boat

Thalassa measures 80 metres with a beam of 13.4 metres and a draught of 3.8 metres. Twin MTU engines give a maximum of 16 knots and a cruising speed of 14, with a range of 5,500 nautical miles at 12 knots from 194,000 litres of fuel. She launched in April and is completing outfitting and sea trials in Amsterdam. Y.CO managed the project. The first renderings appeared in June 2024, so this is a build the market has watched for two years.

Malcolm McKeon drew the exterior, and it reads as a low, sculpted profile with a sharp plumb bow, a hull that widens as it goes aft, and gently curved windows. Milanese studio M2Atelier did the interior, described by the yard as contemporary with a warm and relaxed atmosphere. That is the usual language. The layout is where the brief actually shows.

The stern is now the main deck

The beach club runs to 165 square metres over two levels with 180-degree views, and Feadship has not built a larger one. Teak-covered hatches open out to become terraces over the water. Fitness spaces fold out of the structure so the same volume works as a gym in the morning and as a lounge in the afternoon. Above it sits a pool lounge with a 6.4-metre glass bottom.

Ten years ago that volume would have been machinery, crew mess and tender stowage. Moving the tender garage forward is what releases it, and it costs something. Launching from a forward garage in a beam sea is harder than launching over a transom, and the crew pay for the owner's floor area. This is now the standard trade on a yacht of this size, and owners keep choosing the same way.

A helipad that has to earn its space

The other detail worth pulling out is the helipad doubling as a pickleball court. A certified touch-and-go deck on an 80-metre eats an enormous amount of the best real estate on the boat for something used a handful of times a season, and owners have been pushing back on that arithmetic for years. Making it a sports deck is the obvious answer and it is becoming common.

The rest of the outdoor programme follows the same logic of spaces that change through the day. There is a winter garden that transforms, and an open sundeck built around a circular bar. What has fallen out of the brief is the formal, single-purpose room. Owners are no longer paying for volume that works for one activity.

What this tells a buyer specifying now

Two things are worth taking from Thalassa if you are drawing up a brief. The first is that beach club square metres have become the single most contested number in the specification, and they come out of engineering and crew space. Ask the naval architect early what the stern volume costs in tender size, in crew cabins and in the machinery arrangement, because those answers get expensive to change after steel is cut.

The second is about resale. Large, well-executed beach clubs are the feature that dates slowest, since they are structure and not decoration. Interiors get replaced on a fifteen-year-old boat as a matter of course. A stern that opens properly to the water is not something a refit can add cheaply, and it is one of the few design decisions that still supports a price on a used yacht a decade later.