Maiora's 42 Exuma moves all five guest cabins to the main deck

Hull one is in the sheds, hull two is not sold

The joined hull and superstructure of the first Maiora 42 Exuma have reached Next Yacht Group's Viareggio headquarters and the boat has gone into outfitting, Megayacht News reported on 4 August. Delivery is targeted for summer 2027, and hull one is sold to an American owner. That leaves roughly a year of interior, systems and commissioning work between the boat and her first trial. It is also a year to the month since the model was first put in front of the public, and the delivery date has not moved in that time, which is worth noting in a segment where announced dates routinely slip a season or two.

The line a buyer can actually use is the second one. Yacht Charter Fleet lists hull two as available, with delivery quoted for spring 2028, and the brokerage Allied Yachting carries it at Viareggio with the price on application and the tax not paid. Neither the yard nor the broker publishes a figure, so there is no list price to anchor against and no way to check a quote except by asking a second broker for one. What the position does give a buyer is timing: the yard has one signed contract and an open slot behind it, and the specification on an unstarted second hull is still genuinely open, down to which of the two very different engine packages goes in her.

The layout inversion, and what it costs

The reason to care about this boat is a decision rather than a number. On almost every motor yacht of this size the guest cabins sit on the lower deck, forward of the engine room, with small windows or none, while the main deck is given over to a large saloon and the upper deck carries a helm station and technical spaces. Maiora has turned that upside down. The owner's suite and all four VIP cabins are on the main deck, the lower deck is given to crew, machinery, storage and the garage, and the upper deck and sun deck are handed entirely to guests with the helm and technical gear moved out of the way. Next Yacht Group's chief executive, Sebastiano Fanizza, describes it as a paradigm shift and reaches for the Renaissance to do it; the designer Giorgio Maria Cassetta puts it more plainly, saying the significant innovation the shipyard brought was in the layout.

What that buys is measurable. Cabins on the main deck sit at the widest and brightest part of the boat, they take full-height glass instead of portlights, and they put guests above the waterline rather than beside the machinery. The upper deck runs 36 metres and opens to about 11 metres across with the fold-down terraces down, glazed and openable on all four sides, with a transparent-bottomed pool aft that drops light into the deck below and an 80 square metre sun deck above. What it costs is equally concrete and the yard says less about it: five cabins on the main deck have to come out of the main saloon, so the big single volume that a conventional 42 metre uses to impress people on the dock is not there. Whether that is a loss depends entirely on whether the boat is used by one family or by a rotating cast of guests.

430 GT, 1.55 metres of draft, and two engine packages that are not alike

She is 42.49 metres long on a beam of 8.90 metres, with a composite hull and superstructure, 430 gross tons and 245 tonnes of displacement at full load. The number that stands out is the draft: 1.55 metres at full load, which is shallow for 42 metres and is the whole point of the Exuma name. It is the same argument the yard makes with the 36.90 metre Maiora 36 Exuma, which draws 1.45 metres, and it is aimed squarely at the sort of water the Bahamian cays and the shallower Mediterranean anchorages are made of, where a two and a half metre keel keeps a boat a mile offshore. Accommodation is ten guests in five cabins as standard, up to twelve in six if the optional lower deck cabin is taken, with nine crew in five cabins.

The propulsion choice is where a buyer has to read carefully, because the headline speed belongs to only one of the two options. The standard package is a pair of Volvo Penta D13-IPS 2700 units at 2,000 hp each, and it tops out at 20 knots. The 30 knot figure that appears in every write-up of this model requires the alternative, three MTU 16V 2000 M96L diesels at 2,600 hp each driving steerable waterjets with a central booster, which the yard quotes at 30 knots maximum and around 26 knots cruising. Range is 2,100 nautical miles at 10 knots from 34,000 litres of fuel on the Volvo package and roughly 1,800 on the MTUs, against 1,150 nautical miles recorded for the smaller 36 Exuma, so the flagship is a real step up in legs. Fresh water is 4,500 litres and the garage takes a six metre tender and two jet skis with direct access to the sea.

Elie Saab's first yacht, and what a signature interior does on resale

The interior is the first superyacht project by the Lebanese fashion house Elie Saab, working under the direction of Carlo Colombo of A++, and it uses marble, teak and bronze together with pieces from the Elie Saab Maison collection. Elie Saab Jr, who runs the family business, says the exterior drove the interior and describes teak decking running from outside to in and echoed in the wood ceiling. He is also candid about why a fashion house is here at all: a lot of the house's key customers, he says, live on yachts, own one or charter. Valentina Di Benedetto, who works alongside Elie Saab Sr, says the house had turned down yacht work before because it was never comfortable with the terms and timelines yards asked for. This time the interiors went from first conversation to finished design in about six months, and Giorgio Mattei, deputy chairman of Next Yacht Group, calls it the first step in a long collaboration rather than a one-off.

An owner should weigh the other side of that, because a named interior is a taste as much as an asset. The precedent is thin but consistent: Giorgio Armani drew the Admiral 72 metre for The Italian Sea Group, Fendi and Armani Casa did schemes for Princess, Gucci did the Aquariva with Riva in 2011 and Trussardi did the Dynamiq D4. In each case the badge sold the first hulls and then narrowed the pool of second owners, because a buyer who does not want that specific look is buying a refit rather than a boat. On a series model with an open second slot the practical answer is to establish early how much of the Elie Saab specification is structural and how much is furniture, soft goods and finish that a later owner can change without moving a bulkhead. That question is cheap to ask now and expensive to ask in 2032.

The group behind it, and what the sibling actually transacts at

Maiora was founded in 1975 and is the senior brand in Next Yacht Group, which was formed in 2021 around the historic FIPA yard and also owns AB Yachts, in the group since 2001, and CBI Navi, acquired by Maiora in 2005. The group builds in the order of nineteen units a year and has been visibly delivering the formula this model scales up: in June 2026 it launched the second Maiora 36 Exuma and the third AB 130 together, both for summer delivery, with Fabio Giangrasso, the group's chief operating officer, calling the pair a significant achievement for the yard. It has also been putting money into capability rather than only into models, having taken full control of the metal fabricator Siman with a 20 million euro industrial plan and a 50 metre Maiora, the brand's first metal superyacht, already in build.

The nearest thing to a price signal is the sibling. YachtBuyer's market records show two Maiora 36 Exuma units sold in the past three years, at USD 20.2m in March 2026 and USD 23.4m in July 2025, for a boat 5.6 metres shorter with five crew instead of nine. That does not price the 42, but it sets the floor a buyer should expect to clear, and it is more honest than the silence on the yard's own page. It is also worth setting the 42 Exuma against its in-house rival before shopping outside the group: the AB 130 is 39.65 metres, runs three of the same MTUs to 41 knots, draws 1.30 metres and needs five crew rather than nine. The AB is the faster and cheaper boat to run; the Maiora is the one built to be lived on, and the nine crew berths and the main deck cabins are what that difference costs.