Cristina Gherardi Design

From Dior's Shopfronts to a Feadship Hull

Cristina Gherardi Benardeau is an Italian architect trained in Florence who spent the first half of her career nowhere near a boatyard. Her early work was retail architecture: she conceived the Virgin Megastore and Kenzo stores in France and department store projects for the Brunswig family in Switzerland. From there she joined the LVMH group as director of architecture for Christian Dior Couture, running the brand's retail build-out worldwide, before founding and running the Giorgio Armani Interior Design Studios in New York and Milan, where she spent roughly a decade on private residences, Armani Casa real-estate projects and, for the first time, a yacht interior.

That first yacht was Odessa, a 48.77 metre Christensen delivered in 2009, where Gherardi worked on the interior under the Armani Casa banner and made changes to the general arrangement. Odessa won the ShowBoats Design Award for Best Interior Design in 2010. It was the owner's own next commission, not a marketing push, that turned her into a yacht designer: when he decided to go bigger, he asked her to help pick a yard and to design the boat with him. That became Savannah, and it was the reason Gherardi set up her own practice, CG Design, in Paris in 2011, working alongside Marcello Bozzarelli.

One Office, Both Ends of the Boat

CG Design's defining fact is that it did not split Savannah's design the way almost every yacht in this size is split. Feadship and its in-house De Voogt Naval Architects handled naval architecture and engineering, but Gherardi and Bozzarelli were given both the interior and the exterior styling, an arrangement most studios of any size never get offered once, let alone on a first large commission. Most offices in this directory, including Espen Oeino International, hand the interior to a separate house appointed by the owner; here the same two people who set the layout below also drew the silhouette above the waterline.

The practical effect is a boat where the outside and the inside were argued out by the same eye. The glass that wraps the aft end of each deck, the black band that ties the windows together visually, and the curved partitions inside are not two separate briefs that happened to land on the same hull, they are one idea carried through from the sketch to the joinery. That is unusual enough in superyacht design that it is worth stating plainly before anything else on this page: CG Design is not primarily an interior house or an exterior house, it is the rarer case of a studio hired to do both at once.

Every partition on Savannah is curved. Gherardi's own test for the crew was simple: if there was no genuine nautical reason for a convention, she changed it.

The Nemo Lounge and the Secret Bow Room

Savannah's most photographed space is the Nemo lounge, a two-level room set aft and partly below the waterline with tiered, stadium-style seating facing a curved glass wall onto the sea. It sits in one of the most stable parts of the hull, so anchored guests can watch marine life pass by daylight, and at night a drop-down screen converts the same room into a cinema. Nothing else on a yacht this size does both jobs in the same space, and it is the feature every subsequent review of Savannah leads with.

Forward, and far less publicised, is a second lounge tucked into the bow, a quiet retreat among the waves that most guests never find on a first visit and that CG Design has described as deliberately hidden rather than announced. Between the two, Savannah runs an open-plan main deck where sliding curved-glass doors let the saloon and the weather deck merge into one space, and an owner's suite lit by a large skylight. The studio's own account of the brief is that Gherardi kept asking Feadship's engineers whether a given convention had a genuine nautical reason behind it, and where the answer was no, she changed it.

No Straight Lines, and a Hull Painted Like a Car

Every partition and corridor on Savannah is curved. Gherardi has described the intent plainly: the curves let a guest feel the space and move from one room into the next rather than walking a straight passage from door to door, and the effect is meant to feel like floating rather than transiting. It is a genuinely unusual choice at 83.5 metres, where straight structural bulkheads are the cheap and simple default, and it shows the studio treating the whole interior as one continuous architectural gesture rather than a sequence of separately decorated rooms.

The exterior carries the same commitment to a single idea taken all the way through. Savannah was the first superyacht finished in a complete metallic paint scheme, including her underwater sections, in a colour the yard calls Sea Foam. The finish was applied in one continuous pass by a six-person team using a spray technique Feadship developed specifically for the job, because a metallic base coat shows every join and every stop-start mark that a normal topcoat hides. Milan's Metis Lighting did the lighting design, which on a hull this reflective is not a decorative afterthought but part of making the paint scheme read correctly after dark.

A Hybrid Drivetrain, and What 30 Per Cent Actually Means

Savannah's hybrid propulsion was engineered by Feadship, not by CG Design, but it is inseparable from why the boat exists and it is worth stating in real numbers rather than the marketing shorthand. The system pairs one Wartsila 9L20 main diesel engine of 1,800kW with three Caterpillar gensets, a 1 megawatt-hour Corvus Energy battery bank and an azimuthing thruster mounted in the main propeller's slipstream, switchable across five different operating modes depending on whether the yacht is cruising, manoeuvring in port or sitting at anchor.

Feadship's own figures put the fuel saving at roughly 30 per cent against a conventionally powered yacht of the same size, with the hull itself running seven to eight per cent more efficiently than a standard displacement form. Savannah cruises at around 14 knots, reaches a top speed near 17 knots, and carries a published range close to 6,500 nautical miles, drawn from a 171,470 litre fuel capacity. In her first year of operation she covered 14,000 nautical miles without a reported mechanical issue, which for a genuinely new propulsion architecture, rather than an incremental update of an existing one, is the number that mattered most to Feadship and to the owners of the yachts that followed her.

Three Neptunes in One Year

Savannah won three ShowBoats Design Award Neptune trophies at the 2016 ceremony: Exterior Design and Styling, Interior Layout and Design and Holistic Design, all in the Motor Yacht Above 500GT class. Only one other yacht that year, the sailing yacht Nikata, matched that haul, and Nikata split its credits across separate exterior and interior teams. Savannah's three wins went to the same two-person office for both ends of the brief, which is the rarer achievement of the two.

The same year brought Motor Yacht of the Year at the World Superyacht Awards and Best Power Yacht over 65 metres at the International Superyacht Society Awards. Taken together, a boat conceived by an architect with no previous yacht design credit of her own, on only her second yacht project, swept the major juries of 2016. It is a genuinely rare outcome, and it is also the reason CG Design's public identity still runs almost entirely through this one hull a decade later.

Eight Years, One Change of Owner and a Second Credit

CG Design's yacht portfolio is short: Odessa's interior in 2009, Savannah's interior and exterior in 2015 and then, by most trade reporting, nothing publicly credited for the better part of a decade. That changed with O3, the 109 metre ice-classed explorer Lurssen delivered in 2026 after an eight-year build that began at Peene-Werft in 2018 under the name Project Icecap for a different owner and a different design team, Salt Ship Design on the exterior and Adam Lay Studio on the interior.

The project changed hands in 2022, was renamed Project Shackleton, gained a certified helideck and a length extension, and had its exterior substantially reworked by Espen Oeino International. BOAT International's own delivery report describes Cristina Gherardi Design as having been brought onto the new team to rework the interior, while flagging at an earlier point in its coverage that the credit was still unconfirmed and rumoured rather than formally announced by the yard. Other trade outlets state the interior credit as settled fact. This page follows the more cautious of those two positions: CG Design is reported, credibly and by more than one outlet, to have reimagined O3's interior after 2022, but Yotters has not seen the studio or the owner confirm it directly, and readers comparing the studio for a new commission should treat it as a strong probable second credit rather than a certain one.

What a Client Still Does Not Know Going In

Nothing about what CG Design charges is published anywhere this research could find, which is consistent with every boutique studio in this size bracket: none of them post a rate card, and the only public figure is the market-wide band, not one specific to this office. The SuperYachtReview 2026 price guide puts a designer's fee generally at 1 to 5 per cent of build cost, with project management running a further 2 to 4 per cent on top, both figures sitting outside whatever a yard itself quotes. On a hull costed anywhere near Savannah's market value, that band alone spans tens of millions of dollars, which is exactly why an owner needs the fee written into the design contract rather than inferred from an industry rule of thumb.

A two-person studio also carries a specific, practical risk that a fifty-person office does not: almost everything CG Design has produced publicly runs through Gherardi personally, and the standard industry trading conditions for design consultants say nothing about what happens if a named principal becomes unavailable mid-project. An owner commissioning this studio for a new build should ask for that in the contract explicitly, the same way an owner would with any small named practice, rather than assume it is covered.

Pour qui: An owner who wants one office to own the whole aesthetic of the boat, interior and exterior together, and who is commissioning something genuinely singular rather than a series hull with dense resale comparables.