VPLP Design

Two Classmates Who Never Really Split Up

Van Peteghem was born on 9 January 1957 in Paris; Lauriot-Prevost grew up in North Brittany, where his grandparents' boats set him sailing young. Both enrolled at Southampton, studied together for roughly three years and stayed in touch after graduating, even as Lauriot-Prevost took a formative detour in 1979 to Derek Kelsall's boatyard in Ramsgate, working on a Val 38-foot trimaran. That hands-on multihull apprenticeship, on a design office already known for pushing amas and beam, shaped the vocabulary the pair would build a company on a few years later.

Van Peteghem later described the actual founding moment plainly: I called Vincent in February 1983 and said there's maybe a first boat to design, do you want to partner with me. The result, a 50-foot foiler trimaran named Gerard Lambert, became VPLP's first commission and, depending on the source, either raced the 1984 OSTAR or finished 11th in the La Baule-Dakar; this research could not fully reconcile the two accounts and is not claiming either result as settled. What both sources agree on is that VPLP started as, and for its first years remained, a racing-multihull specialist, with a cruising commission from a fledgling builder called Lagoon still four years away.

Sport-Elec, IDEC and the Jules Verne Habit

Sport-Elec, a composite carbon-Nomex 90-footer that had already sailed under the names Poulain, Un Autre Regard, Charal and Lyonnaise des Eaux Dumez through earlier rebuilds, crossed the Jules Verne finish line on 19 May 1997 with Kersauson's crew aboard in 71 days, 14 hours, 22 minutes and 8 seconds. The same hull went on, under Joyon and a new name, IDEC, to a solo circumnavigation of 72 days, 22 hours, 54 minutes and 22 seconds in 2004, a reminder that a VPLP multihull's racing life routinely outlasts its first campaign and its first name.

The pattern repeated with Groupama 3, the 31.5-metre Multiplast-built trimaran VPLP drew for Franck Cammas. She won the Jules Verne Trophy in February 2010 in 48 days, 7 hours, 44 minutes and 52 seconds, then within months was reconfigured for solo sailing and won the Route du Rhum the same year, a double no crewed multihull over 100 feet had managed before. Sold to Banque Populaire in 2013 and renamed Banque Populaire VII, she went on breaking records, this time transmediterranean and 24-hour distance marks, under Armel Le Cleac'h. A single VPLP hull, in other words, has repeatedly out-earned its own naval architecture fee many times over across three owners and two decades.

Van Peteghem called his old Southampton classmate in February 1983 with a single trimaran commission and a question, do you want to partner with me. Four decades later five of the six boats in the sport's premier round-the-world class, the 2024 Arkea Ultim Challenge fleet, carry the answer.

The Ultim Class Is Close to a VPLP Monopoly

SVR-Lazartigue, launched in July 2021 for Francois Gabart's team, chased dry-hull flying rather than the roughly 20 percent hull-in-water Gabart's earlier Ultim, Macif, had settled for. We started out completely from scratch, VPLP project leader Xavier Guilbaud said of the process, to the point that we seriously thought about making her a catamaran. In the end we kept the trimaran for safety reasons and because it's also the least extreme option. That admission, from inside the design office rather than a brochure, is a useful marker of how far even VPLP's own team considered pushing the format before pulling back.

The class has not been without cost. Maxi Banque Populaire IX, a 32-metre VPLP-designed Ultim, suffered a cross-beam and port float structural failure in 30 to 35 knot winds during the 2018 Route du Rhum, capsized roughly 340 miles northeast of the Azores, and was written off as a total insurance loss after being towed home in pieces; her skipper, Armel Le Cleac'h, was rescued by a passing Spanish fishing boat. Her successor, Maxi Banque Populaire XI, launched in 2021 with enlarged foils Le Cleac'h credited directly to that lesson: the bigger foils, including the rudder T-foils, make the boat more stable when flying and add righting moment, which means increased safety, he told Yachting World as the new boat emerged from the shed at CDK Technologies.

One Full America's Cup Win, One Seconded Engineer

The 2010 win was a complete VPLP commission: Coutts brought the studio the brief in 2007, and three years of what VPLP itself has called the most intense project the office had known produced a wing-sailed, sloop-rigged carbon trimaran that dominated both races of the Cup in Valencia. It remains, alongside the Ultim fleet, the clearest evidence that VPLP can carry a full multihull design from brief to a top-level win on its own name.

The current AC75 monohull generation is a different story, and worth being precise about rather than assuming continuity. VPLP engineer Adrien Letourneur, who had worked on Maxi Banque Populaire 9 and 11, Macif 100, SVR-Lazartigue, Charal 1 and Malizia-Seaexplorer inside VPLP since 2015, was seconded to Luna Rossa Prada Pirelli in autumn 2021 for three years as the team's lead appendage designer within a roughly 40-person in-house design group, according to VPLP's own account of the secondment. That is a real and specific contribution, appendage design on a Cup-winning-calibre campaign, but it is VPLP lending a person, not VPLP drawing the boat, and a reader should not read Cup pedigree into today's AC75 fleet the way the studio's own USA 17 win earns it.

Two Vendee Globe Results With Guillaume Verdier

Banque Populaire VIII, launched on 9 June 2015 at CDK Technologies, was one of five VPLP-Verdier foilers that year, the first generation of IMOCA 60s built with foils rather than straight daggerboards. Le Cleac'h sailed her to victory in the 2016-17 Vendee Globe in 74 days, 3 hours, 35 minutes and 46 seconds, a new circumnavigation record, finishing just under 16 hours ahead of Alex Thomson's Hugo Boss. VPLP designer Vincent Lauriot-Prevost explained the foils' effect at the time in engineering terms: when you tilt the keel to the wind, the keel foil generates the boat's lift, so the boat functions in a more aerial mode than previous generations, a gain he put at several knots in the wind angles a Vendee Globe encounters often.

Gabart's earlier win, aboard the VPLP-Verdier IMOCA Macif in the 2012-13 race, predates the foiling generation and came on a more conventional daggerboard hull, which is worth separating clearly from the foiling Macif Ultim trimaran VPLP later built for the same sponsor and skipper; the two boats share a name and an owner but are different classes, different hulls and different VPLP commissions eight years apart, and this research is flagging the distinction because casual searches conflate them constantly.

Lagoon, Douce France and Hemisphere: the Cruising Side

Douce France, at 138 feet with a beam of just over 50 feet, was voted most innovative sailing catamaran at the 1999 Monaco Yacht Show by ShowBoats magazine after nearly a decade in design and construction. Hemisphere followed in 2011: a 44.2-metre, 300-tonne aluminium catamaran with naval architecture and exterior by VPLP, interior by Michael Leach Design, five en-suite cabins for 12 guests and quarters for 10 crew. She won a 2012 ShowBoats Design Award for that interior layout, a credit that belongs to Michael Leach Design rather than VPLP even though VPLP drew the hull and deck the interior sits inside, and it is the kind of split this page has tried to keep straight throughout rather than crediting the whole yacht to one office. Neither custom yacht has a named private-owner quote in any source this research could find, in contrast to the racing side, where skippers speak on the record constantly; Hemisphere's public record runs to builder case studies and brokerage listings, including a reported 7.5 million euro asking-price reduction, rather than an owner interview.

The production side is what actually pays for the racing research. Lagoon commissioned VPLP to draw a 55-foot cruising catamaran in 1987, and all the money we got from cruising boats was invested into new software and engineers and technology and knowledge to be better, Van Peteghem told Yachting World, describing a deliberate cross-subsidy a volume partner funds that a one-off racing client never could alone. VPLP remains Lagoon's principal designer today, from the compact Lagoon 40 up through the Lagoon 60 and the flagship Lagoon Eighty 3, and also draws the smaller performance-cruising Outremer and Excess lines. Van Peteghem has been candid about the limits of that success too, saying Lagoon has moved toward more of a floating home direction than a sailing one and pointing to a gap in today's range for a genuinely simple multihull aimed at younger sailors that neither VPLP nor its production partners currently fill, a rare case of a naval architect naming a hole in his own studio's most commercially successful product line.

What VPLP Does Not Publish, and Who Runs It Now

This research found no VPLP-specific day rate, percentage fee or standard contract anywhere, on the studio's own site or in the trade press; the only figures available are the industry-wide bands quoted by general yacht-design pricing guides, commonly 1 to 5 percent of build cost for design plus a further 2 to 4 percent for project management, and those are generic market context, not a VPLP quote. What is public is that VPLP, unlike some single-name studios that dissolve with their founder, built succession in deliberately: the 2021 committee includes naval architects who joined the office between 2000 and 2016, among them Antoine Lauriot dit Prevost, Vincent's son, and the firm still operates three divisions, racing, yachting and marine shipping, from offices in Paris, Nantes and Vannes with more than thirty staff.

Vincent Lauriot-Prevost has been unusually direct about what stepping back actually meant in practice: I retired from VPLP, he said, but immediately qualified it: he and Van Peteghem signed a support contract with the new owners and both still sit on the management committee. Asked what might tempt him back into active design work, he answered: a record breaker concept. Van Peteghem, meanwhile, has spent much of his post-management time on sustainability work outside VPLP proper, including the wingsail venture Ayro, later OceanWings, founded in 2018 to cut emissions on cargo ships, which suggests the founders' post-2021 energy has gone toward adjacent projects rather than retirement in the ordinary sense.

Who Should Actually Commission VPLP

The case for VPLP is now hard to argue with in multihulls specifically: an America's Cup win earned outright in 2010, five of six boats in the sport's premier round-the-world class as of the 2024 race, two Vendee Globe results from the Verdier partnership, and a production relationship with Lagoon that has quietly outlasted most of the custom commissions on this page. The founders built something that has survived their own retirement in an orderly way, which several rival studios covered on this site have not managed.

The honest caution is that a modern VPLP racing credit is rarely a solo credit. Sodebo Ultim 3 was drawn by the Sodebo Design Team, Banuls Design and VPLP together; SVR-Lazartigue lists VPLP alongside G Sea Design and Gabart's own MerConcept; and the current America's Cup involvement is one seconded engineer inside Luna Rossa's design group, not a VPLP boat. A buyer or a journalist repeating VPLP as the sole author of any of the last decade's headline campaigns would be overstating it, and this page has tried, hull by hull, not to make that mistake.

Pour qui: Campaigns and owners chasing genuine multihull performance, an Ultim or IMOCA racing program, a fast production cruising catamaran in the Lagoon or Outremer mould, or a large sailing catamaran commission in the Hemisphere idiom. Not the right call for a monohull superyacht, for anyone who needs a single-firm sole design credit on a modern racing campaign since VPLP usually shares that credit now, or for anyone expecting a published price before they pick up the phone.