Achille Salvagni Architetti

The Rome Studio Behind the Name

Salvagni was born in Rome in 1970 and studied architecture at Sapienza University of Rome, graduating with honors before spending a further year at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He opened his own firm, Achille Salvagni Architetti, in 2002, choosing an office on the Palatine Hill next to the Colosseum. For his first several years the practice worked on residential and commercial interiors in Rome. His entry into yacht design came in 2006, when he took on an interior commission as what industry profiles describe as an unremunerated challenge for a client whose office he had just finished. The resulting yacht, M/Y Mikymar, a roughly 36 meter Canados built at the yard's Ostia facility, won Best Interior Design at the World Yachts Trophies in Cannes in 2007, redirecting a meaningful part of his practice toward the water.

The following decade brought steady expansion rather than a single breakout moment. In 2013 Salvagni founded Achille Salvagni Atelier, a dedicated line for limited edition furniture and lighting that let him sell the pieces he was already designing for individual clients as standalone collectible objects. Galleries followed in London on Grafton Street in Mayfair from 2015, relocated within Mayfair in 2021, and on Madison Avenue in New York from 2023, with a Palm Beach location on Worth Avenue announced for 2026. Along the way Elle Decor USA named him to its A-List for four consecutive years from 2015 to 2018, AD France listed him among its 100 best interior designers globally in 2015 and Galerie Magazine named him a Creative Mind in 2020.

Three Practices Under One Name

Unlike marine-only design houses, Salvagni's firm splits its output across yachts, homes and freestanding collectible design, and the furniture line feeds directly into the other two. Pieces developed for a residence or a yacht saloon regularly reappear in the Atelier's gallery catalog, and the studio leans on a network of Rome based artisans, including craftspeople the firm describes as trained in techniques used at the Vatican and by the cabinet makers of the Quirinal Palace, to hand produce items in bronze, onyx, parchment and rare woods. Salvagni has described his own ambition in more modest terms than the materials suggest, telling the design press in an IFDM interview that he would like to be thought of as a gentle architect, someone whose work favors harmony and restraint over spectacle.

He is also explicit that yacht work and residential work are not interchangeable disciplines. In the same interview he said the compositional logic is not the same between boats and homes, because a yacht interior operates around a codified theme set from the start by the hull and layout, while a house allows for a more artisanal, almost Renaissance process of adjusting dimensions, surfaces and colors as the project evolves. On scale, the studio's own public profile is inconsistent: an industry profile from the Yacht Interior Society describes a team of eleven designers, while a separate Interior Design magazine interview reported a current staff of 24, up from an initial two that grew to eight within the firm's first year. Either figure places it well below the headcount of the largest dedicated superyacht design houses.

A yacht interior by Achille Salvagni behaves like a piece of collectible furniture that happens to float, drawn by a Roman architect who treats the bulkhead and the light fixture as seriously as the layout.

The Delivered Portfolio

Salvagni's yacht credits open with M/Y Mikymar, a roughly 120 foot Canados built in Ostia and delivered in 2006, which won the 2007 World Yachts Trophies award that launched his marine career. M/Y Numptia followed in 2011, a 70 meter Rossinavi with exteriors by Tommaso Spadolini, whose interior won the Special Jury Prize for Interior Design with the Widest Appeal at the 2012 World Superyacht Awards. In 2017 Rossinavi delivered Aurora, a roughly 49 meter yacht with exteriors by Fulvio de Simoni, for which Salvagni designed not only the decor but the furniture, the shape of the bulkheads and the lighting; Robb Report named her Yacht of the Year in its 2018 Best of the Best awards. Cantiere delle Marche's RJ 155, flagship of the yard's explorer line with exteriors by Francesco Paszkowski, later won a Boat International Design and Innovation Award for Salvagni's interior, and the boat's own owner said in a CDM Experience interview that the pairing of Paszkowski for the exterior and Salvagni for the interior spaces was chosen as a combination of Italian excellence.

Baglietto's Club M, a 39.8 meter yacht with exteriors by Horacio Bozzo delivered in 2021, became Salvagni's most decorated single project, sweeping the World Superyacht Award for motor yachts 40 meters and above, a Boat International Design and Innovation Award for best motor yacht interior and a Robb Report Best of the Best award, all in the same year. His current, most visible work sits with Azimut: the Grande 36M, a 116 foot flagship with exteriors by Alberto Mancini, won Best Interior Design for yachts 30 to 50 meters at the 2022 World Yachts Trophies and took Best of Show at the 2023 Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, while the smaller Fly 68 carries his interior across three alternative saloon layouts, including an enclosed galley configuration the studio calls Lanterna.

What a Commission Actually Costs

None of the studio's own sites, nor the trade profiles and interviews reviewed for this entry, disclose a fee schedule, day rate or percentage commission for yacht work. That gap is not unusual for a designer operating mostly on semi-custom platforms: on a line like the Azimut Grande or Fly series, the shipyard typically commissions the interior designer directly as part of building the model, so an individual buyer chooses a Salvagni designed hull rather than negotiating his fee separately. On the full-custom projects, such as Club M at Baglietto or the RJ 155 at Cantiere delle Marche, the interior design contract would ordinarily sit between the owner or yard and the studio, negotiated per project rather than published.

General yacht design cost guides, not specific to Salvagni, put design and project management fees on large customized projects at roughly 10 to 25 percent of build cost, with the top of that range reserved for fully bespoke work rather than semi-custom lines. Separately, his furniture and lighting are sold as standalone collectible design through Achille Salvagni Atelier's own galleries, through dealers such as Maison Gerard in New York, and at auction houses including Sotheby's and Piasa, per an Interior Design magazine interview, which means an owner who wants his furniture aboard a yacht is typically making a retail purchase distinct from any interior design commission.

How Salvagni Compares to the Field

The detail that best captures this is Aurora, where Robb Report reported that Salvagni designed not just the decor but the furniture, the shape of the bulkheads and even the lighting, a level of authorship over structural elements that goes beyond what most interior decorators are asked, or able, to do. That habit traces back to his training as an architect first, and it is reinforced by the Rome based artisan network the studio draws on for its bronze, onyx and parchment finishes, work usually associated with gallery scale collectible design rather than production yacht joinery. It also explains why his furniture, rather than sitting as an afterthought, is frequently the starting point for a room's composition.

That approach sets him apart from larger, marine-only studios such as Sinot Yacht Architecture or Winch Design, which run bigger dedicated teams and work exclusively in the yacht and superyacht space. Boat International has described Salvagni as dividing his time equally between vessels, residences and the furniture he shows at his own galleries, a split that produces a smaller and more personally authored body of yacht work than a pure-play marine studio would deliver in the same period. For an owner, the tradeoff is a consistent authorial hand across boat, house and furniture rather than the scale and bench depth of a firm built solely around superyacht production.

Where the Limits Are

The clearest gap is around fee transparency: because no source discloses Salvagni's rates, a prospective owner has no public benchmark before entering a conversation, unlike some competitors who at least confirm a percentage structure in interviews. A second gap is independent owner testimony. The only near-owner commentary found specifically about his yacht work is an unnamed client interview published by Cantiere delle Marche's own CDM Experience channel about the RJ 130 and RJ 155, which credits Salvagni's interior alongside Francesco Paszkowski's exterior but does not identify the owner by name. Coverage in Boat International, Robb Report and the yacht trade press otherwise reads as studio and yard supplied material or boat show reporting rather than independently sourced owner or captain testimony.

A second limitation is concentration of recent, high visibility work on a single builder's semi-custom platforms. The Grande 36M and Fly 68, his two most publicized current projects, are both Azimut semi-custom lines sharing hull and engineering packages across sister yachts, which narrows how much true full-custom freedom is on display in his newest work compared with earlier full-custom projects like Numptia or Club M. A third, smaller issue for anyone trying to size the studio from outside is that public figures disagree: one industry profile puts the design team at eleven, another puts current staff at 24, and neither the practice's own site nor its yacht focused site resolves the discrepancy.

Where the Studio Is Headed

On the collectible design side, Achille Salvagni Atelier opened a Madison Avenue gallery in New York in 2023 and has a Worth Avenue location in Palm Beach planned for 2026, extending a retail footprint that already runs through Rome and Mayfair and includes representation by dealers such as Maison Gerard and auction placements at Sotheby's and Piasa. That growth has run in parallel with, rather than instead of, the studio's marine and residential architecture work, suggesting the founder intends to keep all three strands active rather than specializing further into any one of them.

On the yacht side, the most recent visible output remains the Azimut relationship, with the Fly 68's multiple saloon layouts arriving as a newer variation on a partnership that already produced the award winning Grande 36M. On the residential side, an Interior Design magazine profile pointed to The Benson, a Madison Avenue condominium, as a recent project Salvagni described wanting to feel like a chic Parisian maison, evidence that his highest profile near term work is split roughly as evenly between real estate and yachts as his own public description of his practice suggests.

A chi si rivolge: An owner commissioning a large semi-custom or full-custom motor yacht, most often through Azimut, Baglietto, Rossinavi or Cantiere delle Marche, who wants an interior built like a piece of collectible design rather than a standard production saloon.