Feadship's New 90m Milky Way Was Built Around One Pool

A Feadship Docks at Poole, and a Crowd Gathers

Milky Way, Feadship's Project 828, arrived at Poole Quay in Dorset in the first days of August 2026, drawing a crowd of local yachting enthusiasts who watched a 89.6 metre hull come alongside a working harbour more used to ferries and fishing boats. The specification is public even where the owner is not: 89.6 metres length overall, 13.6 metre beam, 3.7 metre loaded draught and 2,623 gross tons, built as a full-displacement steel hull with an aluminium superstructure and a twin-screw layout. Naval architecture and exterior design ran through Feadship's own Studio De Voogt, with the interior handed to RWD, the British design house. The build was commissioned in 2023, launched from Feadship's Amsterdam outfitting yard in June 2026, and moved through sea trials before the Poole delivery.

What onlookers actually saw was a hull built for looking at: extensive glazing along the superstructure, wide teak decking running most of her length, and the kind of vertical bow and continuous sheer line that Feadship uses to make a 90 metre boat read as one long gesture rather than a stack of decks. A public sighting like this is unusual for a yard whose deliveries normally happen behind Amsterdam's outfitting sheds with the owner's privacy intact. Milky Way's owner has not been named, tagged by nationality, or photographed by any outlet that covered the story, and every report treats that as settled rather than as an open question worth chasing further.

The Brief Was the Pool, Not the Spec Sheet

The detail that every outlet led with was not the length but a single amenity: a 16.7 by 3 metre swimming pool on the main deck, close to 50 square metres of water, described consistently as among the largest pools Feadship has built into any hull. Coverage attributes the brief to an owner reported as a keen swimmer with an active-lifestyle mandate for the boat, which is a different starting point from the usual full-beam owner's suite or the biggest possible saloon. A pool that size on the main deck eats volume that would otherwise go to guest cabins, tender storage, or entertaining space, and everything else on Milky Way appears to have been arranged around holding onto it.

Studio De Voogt's Matt Bacon described refining the exterior language with what he called a very strong vertical bow and an emphasis on the long structural lines, adding that the mast carries a very strong character to balance the volumes. Read against the pool brief, that is a naval architect describing how he compensated visually for a hull whose internal volume was not distributed the conventional way. It is the kind of trade-off a production yard would not entertain and a full-custom yard exists to solve.

Two Studios, One Yacht

Feadship split the job the way it usually does on its largest custom builds: naval architecture and exterior styling in-house through Studio De Voogt, and the interior out to RWD, the British studio that has worked with Feadship across several recent large projects. RWD's David Waite-Wright said bringing the project together, from the earliest concept sketches to the last detail, had been a genuine pleasure, and described the studio's relationship with the yard as built on trust, experience and shared expertise rather than a one-off commission.

Feadship sales director Maarten Jansen framed the brief in similarly proprietary terms, saying the client had a precise vision for a unique, full-custom Feadship and that the yard was proud of the result. That kind of quote is standard delivery-day language from any builder and should be read as such, but the surrounding facts back it up: Feadship was running roughly sixteen superyachts through construction at the same time, including the larger 332 foot Project 1014, also with RWD on interiors and launched in April 2026, which suggests the yard has capacity and a working relationship it trusts to take on an unusual brief rather than push a client toward a safer layout.

What a Buyer Actually Gets

Beyond the pool, confirmed onboard spaces include a spa, a sauna, a swim platform and a tender garage, wrapped in decking and glazing built for a climate where the owner plans to actually use the water rather than look at it from a shaded deck. There is no charter program attached to Milky Way and no indication one is planned; every report treats her as a private yacht built for one owner's use, not an asset meant to earn her keep between seasons.

The widely quoted 300 million dollar price is a press estimate repeated across several outlets, not a figure Feadship has confirmed, and the yard follows its usual practice of never publishing prices on custom builds. No engine make, propulsion configuration, range or top speed has been published either, which is unusual for a yacht this size and this publicly delivered; Feadship has kept the technical package as private as the owner. A buyer pricing a comparable full-custom build should treat 300 million as a rough anchor at best, not a quote.

What Nobody Will Say

No captain, broker or owner has spoken on the record about Milky Way, and no independent sea trial or performance report exists for this hull. The only named voices in the entire story are Feadship's own sales director and the two studios it contracted, which is normal for a yard whose most private clients specifically pay for that silence, but it means a reader has almost nothing outside the builder's own account to weigh the boat against.

What the story does establish, reliably, is that a full-custom brief can still reorder a hull's basic architecture around one owner's habit rather than a spec sheet, and that Feadship and RWD had the standing relationship and the order-book depth to take that brief on without visible compromise. Whether it was 300 million dollars well spent is a question only the owner, who has said nothing, can actually answer.