Ron Holland Design

From a Capsized Dinghy to a Kinsale Studio

Holland was born in Auckland in 1947 and was racing competitively by age 13; at 15 he crewed the 36 foot ketch Aloha on the 1,000 mile passage across the Tasman Sea to Sydney. He apprenticed with boatbuilder Keith Atkinson while taking classes at Auckland Technical Institute, where two teachers, Peter Peal and Allan Wright, pushed him from building boats toward drawing them. His first commission came at 19, a 26 foot yacht called White Rabbit, and at 21 he was invited to San Francisco to work as a design draftsman for the American designer Gary Mull, a job that put him alongside some of the era's most competitive ocean racers.

The turning point was Eygthene, a Quarter Tonner Holland designed and built himself, which won the USA Quarter-Ton Regatta in St Petersburg, Florida, and then the World Championship Quarter-Ton Cup in England in 1973. That result brought a commission from an Irish yachtsman to design the one-tonner Golden Apple, and the relationship with Ireland stuck: Holland opened Ron Holland Design in County Cork in 1974, later settling the studio into a Georgian house beside Kinsale Yacht Club. Early Half Ton Cup designs, Golden Shamrock in 1974 and Silver Shamrock III in 1977, plus a Camper & Nicholson Nicholson 33 that won the 1975 Fastnet Race as Golden Delicious, built the reputation that carried the studio into 40 foot Fastnet winners like Imp and 80 foot Maxis like Condor and Kialoa through the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Felicita West and the Ten-Hull Ketch

Felicita West was, by the studio's own account, the largest aluminium yacht built at the time, a claim this research could not independently verify but which is plausible for an all-aluminium 64 metre hull launched in 2003. She sails today as Spirit of the C's after a later refit. Perini Navi's managing director at the time, Giancarlo Ragnetti, then commissioned a standing series of 56 metre ketches from the same naval architecture: this research independently traced ten of them by name and delivery year through Boat International's own yacht directory: Burrasca (2003), Zenji (2004), Rosehearty (2006), Caoz 14 (2007), Piropo and Bayesian, then named Salute (both 2008), Asahi (2009) and Melek and Panthalassea (both 2010), closing with Fidelis in 2011.

Three smaller Perini hulls carry the same naval architecture credit: Parsifal III, a 54 metre delivered in 2005, and the 50 metre pair Baracuda Valletta (2008) and Enterprise (2012). Rosehearty went to the media proprietor Rupert Murdoch, a repeat Perini client, before selling on; Parsifal III won Sailing Superyacht of the Year at the 2006 World Superyacht Awards. None of the ten-hull ketch series, or the three smaller sisters, needed a second naval architect brought in: the same Kinsale-drawn hull form carried across more than a decade of Perini deliveries.

Bayesian and Mirabella V were drawn by the same small studio, one still the largest single-masted sailing yacht ever built, the other now the subject of a UK accident investigation into a stability limit nobody wrote into her paperwork.

The 60 Metre Series: From Seahawk to Katana

Seahawk (2013) opened the 60 metre series, followed by Perseus cubed in 2015 and Seven in 2018, all three built while Perini Navi still traded under its original ownership. Perini Navi went into administration in 2021, and The Italian Sea Group acquired the brand in January 2022 with a plan to revive it; Katana, the fourth 60 metre hull, restarted construction under the new ownership and was delivered in July 2025, with naval architecture credited to Ron Holland and interiors again by Remi Tessier. The Italian Sea Group's chief commercial officer, Gianmaria Costantino, called the delivery another step in the Perini Navi relaunch project, a builder's statement rather than an independent account, but Katana's existence itself confirms the naval architecture relationship survived the yard's bankruptcy and change of ownership.

Ron Holland Design's own about page, unrevised since around 2021 on its own copyright notice, states the Perini collaboration has delivered 23 yachts to date with a further 60 metre ketch under construction, a figure this research could not fully itemise: the named hulls independently traced across Felicita West, the ten-boat 56 metre series, the three smaller sisters and the four-boat 60 metre series total eighteen. Whether the studio's 23 includes unbuilt or renamed hulls this research did not find is not stated anywhere public, and the site has not been updated to reflect Katana's 2025 delivery.

Mirabella V, Still the Largest Single-Masted Sloop Afloat

Built for the former Avis chairman Joseph Vittoria to a brief mixing serious performance with motoryacht-scale amenities, she carries an 88.5 metre mast and a lifting keel to work shallow harbours. The Texas investor Rod Lewis bought her in 2011, renamed her M5 and has raced her at the St Barths Bucket. Her later refit history, including a 2013 to 2014 Pendennis rebuild and a 2022 emergency keel repair after striking a submerged object off Peru, ran through Rob Doyle Design, the independent Kinsale studio that took over Ron Holland Design's old Irish office and staff in 2013; the naval architecture credit for the original 2004 hull, though, sits with Ron Holland Design, drawn before that split.

Her carbon-fibre mast rises 88.3 metres, tall enough to have been the tallest ever stepped on a yacht at launch, and carries roughly 3,717 square metres of sail on the single stick. The lifting keel drops from close to ten metres to about four, a fin built by the Cornish keel specialist Henry Irons and swung on a hydraulic ram with a ten metre stroke, so a yacht sized for open ocean racing can still tuck into a harbour a fixed-keel boat her size could never enter. VT Shipbuilding, the former Vosper Thornycroft naval yard, built the GRP hull and superstructure, carrying its composite-construction expertise from warship contracts into the largest sloop ever launched.

Beyond the Ketch: Royal Huisman, Cheoy Lee and Nautor Swan

Royal Huisman built Whirlwind in 1986, a 103 foot yacht the studio credits as pioneering superyacht build technology for that yard, and followed it in 2009 with Ethereal, a 58 metre ketch built around a battery bank that let her run on hybrid power, credited jointly to Ron Holland Design and Pieter Beeldsnijder. Cheoy Lee in Hong Kong built the 45 metre expedition motor yacht Dorothea III in 2007, which went on to log more than 170,000 miles and won the Voyager's Award at the 2020 World Superyacht Awards after a 34,965 mile circumnavigation that also raised money for humanitarian causes along the way. The Dutch yard Vitters built a 48.5 metre Ron Holland sailing yacht in 1994, and the Turkish builder RMK Marine delivered the 45 metre motor yacht Karia in 2011.

Away from superyachts, Nautor's Swan built the Swan 42 to a Ron Holland design from 1980 to 1985, 38 hulls in total, part of a run of Swan designs through the 1980s that built his reputation well before the first Perini commission. The production builder Trintella also sold a 14.4 metre monohull to a Ron Holland design between 1996 and 2002. It is a wider and older client base than the Perini relationship alone suggests, even if the superyacht press rarely mentions it.

When the Design Was Tested: The Loss of Bayesian

She was delivered in 2008 to Dutch ownership, sold in 2014 to Revtom Ltd, a company controlled by Angela Bacares, and renamed Bayesian after the statistical method behind her husband Mike Lynch's software company Autonomy. At anchor near Porticello before dawn on 19 August 2024, with her sails down, her retractable keel raised and her 72 metre mast, at launch the tallest yacht mast in the world, still stepped, a sudden storm hit the anchorage. The yacht went fully underwater within roughly 15 minutes. Fifteen people survived; Lynch, his daughter Hannah, Jonathan and Judy Bloomer, Christopher and Neda Morvillo and the chef Recaldo Thomas did not.

The MAIB's interim report, published 15 May 2025, found that in that motoring configuration Bayesian could be capsized by a beam gust of roughly 63 knots, and that once she heeled past 70.6 degrees in that state she could not recover. The report's central finding is not that the hull form itself was flawed but that this vulnerability, specific to sails down and keel raised, was missing from the yacht's onboard stability information book, so neither her owner nor her crew knew the risk they were anchored under. The Italian Sea Group, which now owns the Perini Navi brand, has sued the New York Times over an October 2024 article it says implied a design flaw, and Italian prosecutors have separately opened a manslaughter investigation naming the yacht's captain, who has declined to answer questions. None of that is settled, and a reader comparing this hull form to any other Ron Holland-designed sloop should treat the finding as specific to Bayesian's documented configuration rather than as evidence against the wider ketch series, none of which shares her single-mast, retractable-keel arrangement.

Vancouver Today: What the Studio Actually Does Now

The studio's own news archive, read in full for this research, shows a steep drop-off: after Ron Holland Design's involvement in Ethereal was recapped in July 2022, the next post on the site's own timeline is not until August 2025, announcing a gallery show of Holland's watercolours in Torrance, California. In between, the visible record is a Superyacht Forum VR demonstration, a charity dinghy-sail donation to a junior sailing club in Corfu and a crew photo from a Vancouver regatta, not a design brief or a keel-laying. The firm's own about page, publishing under a 2021 copyright notice, still describes a 60 metre ketch as presently under construction, a description Katana's confirmed July 2025 delivery has already overtaken without the site catching up.

No current design director, partner or team roster beyond Ron Holland himself is published anywhere this research found; the Kinsale office and staff that once supported him went to Rob Doyle in 2013, and no successor structure in Vancouver is named on the studio's own site, on LinkedIn or in trade coverage. The one confirmed live thread connecting the name to active naval architecture work is the continuing Perini Navi 60 metre series under The Italian Sea Group, which is a legacy relationship rather than a new client. An owner searching for evidence of an actively staffed studio taking on new sailing yacht commissions today will not find one published.

What a Commission Costs, and What Nobody Publishes

The only pricing figure available anywhere is the market-wide band published in the SuperYachtReview 2026 price guide: 1 to 5 per cent of build cost for the naval architect or designer, plus a further 2 to 4 per cent for project management, both figures sitting outside a yard's own quoted price. Nothing published by Ron Holland Design itself confirms whether that band applies here, what a letter of intent from the studio looks like, or what stage of a build counts as the point of no return.

Copyright and reuse terms are equally undocumented. The professional default across naval architecture, set out in standard trading conditions used industry-wide, is that the design office retains ownership of the drawings and licenses a single hull to the client, so an owner planning a sister-ship or a heavy structural refit through a different yard should ask directly, in writing, whether any licence extends to reuse and whether drawings would be released in native format. Contact for the studio runs through its Vancouver office, Suite 216, 1650 Duranleau Street, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; no separate day rate, retainer or concept-study fee is published for a new enquiry.

Who Should Call Vancouver

The strength here is historical depth that few living yacht designers can match: eighteen independently traceable Perini Navi hulls across three decades, Mirabella V still the largest single-masted sailing yacht ever built two decades after her launch, a hybrid-propulsion first in Ethereal and 38 Nautor Swan production hulls from a full ten years before the first superyacht commission. A broker, surveyor or owner researching any of those specific boats has a real, well-documented naval architecture history to draw on, corroborated across Boat International, Superyacht Times and the builders themselves.

The honest caution is just as concrete. This research found no active team beyond Ron Holland himself, now 79 and semi-retired to Vancouver, no new-build commission independent of the long-running Perini Navi relationship, and a studio website that has not caught up with its own most recent delivery. Bayesian's loss, whatever the ongoing legal disputes settle, is now a permanent part of this design history, and the MAIB's finding about undocumented stability limits in one specific configuration is exactly the kind of detail a prospective owner of any large raised-keel sloop, from this studio or any other, should ask their own naval architect about directly rather than assume from a brochure.

A chi si rivolge: Anyone researching the naval architecture behind an existing Perini Navi ketch or Mirabella V herself, not an owner looking for an actively staffed studio ready to take on a new full custom sailing yacht commission today.