Omega Architects

From Eindhoven to Heesen's Drawing Office

Laupman grew up near Nijmegen, on the Rhine, the son of an interior designer and artist and a manufacturer and inventor. He took a master's degree in architecture and design at Eindhoven University of Technology, and has named the architect Hans Hollein, Le Corbusier and the New York Five among his influences. His early career in yachting included time with the naval architect Pieter Beeldsnijder before he moved in-house to Heesen Yachts, where he worked for several years, by his own account running the drawing office alongside Heesen's production team.

Omega Architects was founded in Druten in 1995 and has stayed there since, at Klepperheide 22, a small town on the river Waal roughly 20 kilometres from Heesen's own yard at Oss. The proximity is not incidental. Almost everything the studio has delivered in three decades carries a Heesen hull underneath it, and Laupman has continued to take on architectural work for buildings and private houses alongside the yachts, under the same Omega Architects name.

What the Studio Actually Draws

The pattern holds across the fleet checked for this entry. Home, the 2017 Heesen hybrid, carries an Omega exterior with an interior that started with Sinot Exclusive Yacht Design and was finished by Cristiano Gatto after the owner asked for a change. Aquamarine, delivered in January 2021, pairs an Omega exterior with a Cristiano Gatto interior. Lusine, delivered in 2022, pairs it with an interior by Sinot. Reliance, delivered in September 2023, pairs it with one by Luca Dini. Santosha, the 2023-sold aluminium yacht built as Project Akira, pairs it with an interior by Harrison Eidsgaard. On CRN's Yalla the interior went to Droulers Architecture and CRN's own team, and on Alia Yachts' Samurai it went to RWD. In every one of those cases the naval architecture behind the FDHF hull form was Van Oossanen's, not Omega's.

That is a narrower remit than the studio's own website copy, which talks about exterior and interior together, and narrower again than the word Architects implies. It is also a specific and useful thing for a buyer to know before assuming one office will hand over a finished boat: the exterior is the reliable, repeated credit; the interior and the hull engineering are each a separate appointment, made project by project, and the buyer should expect to make or approve that appointment himself.

On delivery after delivery, Home, Aquamarine, Lusine, Reliance, Santosha, the interior went to a different named studio chosen by the owner; the one constant credited every time is the exterior, which is the business this office actually sells.

The Heesen Relationship

Heesen's design director Hugo Verlinden, describing the working relationship to SuperyachtNews, said of Laupman: "He is extremely creative in his designs and works exactly according to his clients wishes," and noted their own collaboration had by then run past ten years. Heesen builds most of its range as semi-custom platforms, sold to a buyer either from a set of drawings or, more often now, as a hull already under construction under an internal project name before an owner is found.

For a buyer that changes what commissioning actually means. On most Heesen hulls the Omega exterior is fixed before anyone signs anything, because the yard designs and starts the boat first. Reliance, delivered in 2023, was ordered and built as Project Gemini, keel laid in late 2019, launched from the shed in October 2022 and sold along the way. Lusine, delivered in 2022, was built and sold as Project Falcon. In both cases the owner bought into an Omega exterior that already existed rather than commissioning one from a blank sheet.

Galactica Star and the Fast Displacement Look

The FDHF blends a displacement hull's low resistance with a semi-displacement hull's speed, and Heesen wanted an exterior that read as different, not just as another motor yacht profile. Laupman's answer was a long, low, sculpted superstructure over the new hull form. Heesen has said the boat reaches a top speed around 28 knots while burning notably less fuel than a comparable displacement yacht of her size, a claim that comes from the yard rather than an independent trial.

Home followed in July 2017 at 49.78 metres, the first Heesen to pair hybrid propulsion with the FDHF hull, again with an Omega exterior: a vertical bow, high bulwarks around an open foredeck and floor to ceiling glass amidships. Between them the two boats mark the exterior identity Omega has carried through the FDHF range as it moved from steel to aluminium construction and from diesel to hybrid propulsion over the following decade.

Yalla and the Habit of Learning Boat to Boat

Yalla's white hull and dark blue upperworks, and a full-beam beach and pool deck enclosed at the owner's request, were built at CRN's Ancona yard with the naval architecture and interior handled by CRN's own team and Droulers Architecture. Omega supplied the exterior. It was, at 73 metres, the largest yacht the studio had drawn to that point.

Speaking at the 2015 Monaco Yacht Show, Laupman described using the boat as a study: the enclosed beach deck had suited that owner, he said, but on the next series in the same family he planned to bring the pool and beach area back outside using a stepped deck instead, so guests move down toward the waterline gradually rather than through an enclosed room. It is a small, specific example of how a semi-custom design house actually iterates: not a fixed house style handed down whole, but successive owners' choices folded back into the next hull.

Lusine and Reliance, the Recent Steel Range

Lusine, 60 metres, delivered in 2022 with a top speed of 17.5 knots and a stated range of 4,200 nautical miles, carries a raised, curved line Omega calls a bird's wing motif, run through the main deck, bridge and sundeck to break up the horizontal glazing without a hard step. She won Best Custom Yacht of the Year at the World Yacht Trophies in 2022; her interior, by Sinot, was untouched at the time of her market listing, having never been lived aboard by an owner.

Reliance, 55 metres and steel-hulled with an aluminium superstructure, was delivered in September 2023 after a build that ran from a late-2019 keel-laying to an October 2022 launch. Omega gave her a shark-grey hull and a more predatory, muscular profile than Lusine's, with Luca Dini's interior behind it. Both boats belong to Heesen's Steel FDHF series, which by 2023 had put five sister hulls in the water, Lusine and Reliance among them alongside Vida and Laurentia.

Beyond Heesen: Italy and Turkey

Samurai paired an Omega exterior with naval architecture again by Van Oossanen and an interior by RWD, on a steel hull with an aluminium superstructure and a stated range near 4,250 nautical miles. It is evidence the studio's working method, exterior drawn in-house while naval architecture and interior go to named partners elsewhere, travels to yards well outside its home base. CRN's Yalla is the equivalent case in Italy, and the studio's own biography also names Mulder in the Netherlands and, in passing, Hakvoort and Venture Yachts among yards it has worked with.

Set against Heesen's more than 80 credited projects, though, this is a short list. Nearly everything Omega has actually delivered still carries a Heesen hull, and the CRN and Alia Yachts jobs read as the exception that proves it: real, delivered, well documented, but not yet a second deep relationship of the kind the studio has with its home yard.

Seasar, and the Limit of What Has Actually Been Built

Laupman described Seasar as a rational development of an integrated hull-and-body design the studio had been refining for roughly a decade, fusing hull and superstructure into one continuous surface up to the wheelhouse deck and breaking the horizontal lines with a single swooping arch aft. The concept was drawn for steel and aluminium construction on a fast-displacement hull, sized at roughly 2,000 GT, with fuel-cell or biofuel generators proposed for a quiet electric mode and accommodation for 14 guests.

A concept is a real piece of design work and a fair guide to where the studio wants to go, but it is not a track record. For an owner shopping in the 80 metre and above full-custom bracket, where rivals with decades of delivered hulls above 100 metres already operate, Omega has nothing built to point to yet. Its proven ground stops at the mid-70s metres, on yachts built to a yard's own semi-custom platform rather than a fully bespoke hull.

What a Commission Costs, and How It Actually Starts

That is the practical consequence of working mostly inside Heesen's semi-custom model. A buyer choosing a Heesen hull, whether an already-under-construction project or a new order against an established platform, is buying a boat with the exterior design cost folded into the price the yard quotes; there is no visible line for Omega's fee the way a fully custom atelier commission would show one. For the CRN and Alia Yachts work, where a yard builds a genuinely one-off hull, some direct design agreement presumably exists, but nothing about its structure or cost has been made public by either the studio or the yards.

The only figure available for the wider trade is the market-wide band published in SuperYachtReview's 2026 price guide, updated in March 2026: a designer's fee of 1 to 5 per cent of build cost, plus a further 2 to 4 per cent for project management, both normally excluded from a yard's headline price. That figure describes the industry, not this studio specifically, and it is worth stating plainly that no comparable number exists anywhere for Omega Architects itself.

The Faster Route, and Its Trade-Off

Both boats were sold to their eventual owners while still in build, under yard project names rather than the names they carry today, with Heesen's own warranties on hull, systems and major equipment carrying over intact. What the buyer chooses at that point is largely confined to interior finishes, some outfitting and the choice of interior designer; the hull form, the exterior lines and the general arrangement are already fixed.

That is the trade a semi-custom platform always makes. It removes most of the schedule and cost risk that a ground-up custom commission carries, and it is the route the large majority of Omega's delivered work has actually gone through. It also means the lock-in point for this studio's work is not a contract signature so much as the moment a buyer commits to a specific in-build hull; after that, changing the exterior design is not a realistic option.

What the Name Is Worth at Resale

Heesen itself, writing about its own brokerage market, attributes strong resale performance to build quality and service rather than to any single designer, and the comparables bear that out: a 2025-built 55 metre Steel hull from the same Omega-designed series was listed around 56.9 million euros, while an older 2011-built 55 metre in the pre-owned market was recently cut to around 26 million euros, a gap that tracks age and condition far more clearly than it tracks who drew the outside.

The honest reading is that Omega's exterior is one input into a Heesen resale value that is driven mainly by the yard's name, the FDHF hull's fuel economy and upkeep. Because the same office has drawn most of Heesen's range for three decades, its look does not stand out as an individually collectible signature the way a one-off, 100 metre-plus custom profile can; it is the house style of a builder whose own reputation is doing most of the work.

Pour qui: Owners buying into Heesen's semi-custom range between roughly 45 and 74 metres who want a proven, well-tested exterior and are prepared to appoint their own interior studio, plus owners considering a full custom project at CRN, Alia Yachts or Mulder who want a Dutch exterior specialist experienced with the FDHF hull form.