Remi Tessier

A cabinetmaker before he was a designer

Tessier did not study design. He trained as a cabinetmaker inside Les Compagnons du Devoir, a centuries-old French guild that moves its apprentices between workshops every few months so they leave with hands-on mastery of materials rather than a portfolio of drawings. He opened his own studio in 1988, working first on retail spaces and private houses in Lyon, Geneva and Saint-Tropez, nothing to do with boats.

The move into yachts came in 2000, when his studio relocated to Paris and was commissioned to design the interior of Squall, a 52 metre ketch under construction at Perini Navi, delivered in 2002. That single commission set the pattern for almost everything that followed: he has never taken an exterior styling or naval architecture credit, and the studio he still runs from Paris, about fifteen people today, does interiors and nothing else.

The Perini Navi years

No other yard has used him this many times. After Squall, Perini Navi brought him back for Parsifal III, a 54 metre ketch delivered in 2005 for the Danish entrepreneur Kim Vibe-Petersen, which swept the 2006 World Superyacht Awards for both the yacht and its interior and later gained a wider audience as a charter setting on the Bravo reality series Below Deck Sailing Yacht. Three years later came Salute, a 56 metre delivered in 2008 and sold on and renamed Bayesian, which sank in a storm off Porticello, Sicily in August 2024 with the loss of seven of the 22 people aboard; the naval architecture was Ron Holland's, and the investigations that followed examined the hull's stability and the conditions on the night, not the interior fit-out.

The relationship kept going. Grace E, a 73 metre delivered in 2014 and now sailing as Nautilus, took Motor Yacht of the Year at the 2015 World Superyacht Awards. And in 2025, after Perini Navi's post-bankruptcy relaunch under The Italian Sea Group, the 60 metre Katana became his fifth hull for the yard, its interior earning a Judges' Special Award at the 2026 World Superyacht Awards, one judge calling it one of the nicest sailing yacht interiors they had seen. Five commissions from one yard over 23 years, through a change of ownership, is a track record almost no interior designer in the business can point to.

I don't want to have a style, I want to have style, Tessier says of a practice that has now dressed the inside of five Perini Navi sailing yachts, one after another, for three different owners.

Beyond Perini Navi: Bertarelli and two Moonrises

Vava II, delivered by the British yard Devonport in 2012 for the Swiss-Italian businessman Ernesto Bertarelli, paired an RWD exterior with a Tessier interior across 18 staterooms for up to 36 guests, and remains one of the largest yachts he has ever fitted out. In 2010 he took on a very different brief: the interior of Nahlin, a 1930 steam yacht built by John Brown and Company and famous as the vessel that carried Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson along the Dalmatian coast in 1936. The restoration was led by the yacht's original designer, G.L. Watson and Co, with the hull worked at Nobiskrug in Germany and the engineering and fit-out completed at Blohm and Voss Repair in Hamburg; no photograph of Tessier's interior aboard Nahlin has ever been made public, which is unusual for a project of this profile.

His most recent proof of relevance is a repeat Feadship client who has now commissioned two different superyachts under the same name. The first Moonrise, just under 100 metres, was delivered in 2020; the second, 101 metres and with Feadship's first mast built without external satellite domes, was delivered in July 2025 with Tessier again doing the interior, exactly as Studio De Voogt again did the naval architecture. A client returning to the same interior designer for a second flagship, six years apart, is one of the harder things to fake in this industry.

What a Tessier interior looks like

Tessier is explicit that he is not selling a recognisable look. I don't want to have a style, I want to have style, he has said, distinguishing between a designer known for one aesthetic and one known for a standard of execution applied differently each time. He describes himself as an artisan who likes to design something unique and likes handmade things, a claim his cabinetmaking background makes more credible than it would be from someone who came up through a design school.

Across his fleet the common thread is restraint: light polished woods, quiet material palettes, hidden lighting rather than statement fixtures, and joinery built to the tolerances of a trained cabinetmaker rather than a decorator's specification. He has said the aim is an emotional interior, not something perfect and cold, and that pushing for quality has to stop short of a coldness that reads as sterile. In practice this has meant he can move between a 52 metre ketch, a 96 metre motor yacht and a 101 metre flagship without the work reading as a single formula stretched across three different hulls.

The Jan Koum dispute

This is the one part of the record that is not a design credit. Koum, a longtime client, accused Tessier of a pattern of predation, alleging he misrepresented the value and origin of art and furnishings bought on Koum's behalf and took undisclosed kickbacks from the dealers and workshops he used, across a body of work that included two roughly 330 foot yachts and five houses, two of them Californian estates reported at around 100 million dollars each, with a combined value put at more than 700 million dollars.

The case was filed 29 September 2025 and settled confidentially in February 2026, so none of the specific allegations were tested in court and Tessier did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement. It is nonetheless a real, named, on-the-record dispute involving one of the studio's largest documented clients, and an owner weighing this studio for a comparable scale of commission should know the allegations exist and were serious enough to reach federal court, even though they were resolved privately rather than proven.

What it costs and how the commission runs

No published number exists for what Tessier charges specifically. The only public benchmark is the industry-wide figure that a yacht designer's fee runs 1 to 5 per cent of build cost, on top of project management fees of 2 to 4 per cent, both of which sit outside a yard's quoted price. Because Tessier is an interior specialist rather than the naval architect or exterior stylist, his fee is typically the smaller of several design appointments on the same build, agreed separately with the yard and the owner's project manager rather than published anywhere.

The studio's own account of its working method is that Tessier personally oversees every project, across a stated 20 to 25 commissions running at once from a team of about 15. That is a genuinely small ratio of principal attention to workload for a practice this senior, and it cuts both ways: a client gets the founder's own eye on the joinery, but a studio this size and this personality-led carries obvious key-person risk if Tessier becomes unavailable mid-build, and nothing in the public record describes a succession or step-in plan.

Who this is for, and the resale case

The case for Tessier is concentrated rather than broad. He is the interior designer with the longest unbroken relationship with one yard in the sailing yacht world, five Perini Navi hulls since 2002 through a change of ownership, and he is trusted enough by at least one owner to be reappointed for a second 100 metre-plus flagship six years after the first. Brokers selling a Tessier-interior yacht, from Squall's 2026 refit listing to Vava II's charter brochure, lead with his name, which suggests it does carry resale and charter weight in this specific niche of large sailing and motor yachts.

The case against is just as concrete. He offers no exterior styling or naval architecture, so an owner still needs and funds a separate appointment for the hull and profile; no fee schedule is published, so budgeting the interior against the rest of the build requires a direct quote; the practice is built around one person's personal attention across 20 to 25 live projects, which is a real capacity constraint at the top of the market; and the Koum litigation, settled rather than dismissed, is a documented reason for a new client to insist on transparent, itemised procurement rather than a lump-sum arrangement for furnishings and art.

A chi si rivolge: An owner who has already picked a yard and a naval architect and wants the interior handled by one named craftsman rather than a design department, particularly aboard a Perini Navi sailing yacht or a Feadship, where his work is already the known quantity the broker will bring up first.