Marco Ferrari's M/Y 115 Has a Submarine, and No Yard Yet

A private deck built around a submarine

M/Y 115 is drawn at 115 metres and 5,000 GT, with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure and an optional Ice Class 1D notation for cold-water work. The studio pairs that with a hybrid propulsion package, main engines, generators and a battery bank, and claims a range around 7,000 nautical miles, though it does not say at what speed. Guest capacity is set at 18, built around a full owner's deck: a private apartment, a studio, a walk-in wardrobe, an observation lounge, outdoor dining, a Jacuzzi and a private helipad, kept separate from four VIP suites with private balconies and four further guest cabins. The centrepiece is a six-person submarine rated to dive to 1,000 metres, launched and recovered from a dedicated bay.

Elsewhere the brief runs to an 11-metre infinity pool with a glass-bottom section, a winter garden, a private cinema and a full gym, plus a beach club with its own spa, an indoor pool and fold-down terraces. The submarine's above-water counterpart is a Nemo Lounge, an underwater-view room built into the hull so guests who never dive still get the view. The toy inventory is itemised rather than vague: two 12-metre limo tenders, a 10-metre open tender, a 6.5-metre RHIB, dive gear, Jet Skis, Seabobs, kayaks and inflatables, launched from twin helipads set on the bridge deck and the sundeck for operational flexibility on long cruises.

The studio's own lineage tells the real story

Marco Ferrari has been here before, repeatedly. The 77.5-metre Atlantico concept came in 2019, the 137.5-metre Project Neptune, with hydrogen propulsion, in 2023, and a run of smaller studies since, including the 42.5-metre M40 and the 65.6-metre F65. In June 2026 the studio released the 80-metre M80, another hybrid explorer with Ice Class capability, unveiled 3 June. M/Y 115, at 115 metres, is the largest of the run since Neptune and continues a pattern: a new hull size roughly every few months, each one pitched at the same exploration-and-extreme-leisure brief.

One detail carries over almost unchanged. The underwater-view room on M/Y 115 is named the Nemo Lounge, the identical name the studio gave the equivalent space on M80 barely more than two months earlier. That is not disqualifying, a studio is entitled to reuse a good idea, but it is a sign the feature is a house concept being fitted to successive hulls rather than something worked up specifically for this owner's brief. Every figure in the release, the range, the tonnage, the battery capacity, comes from the studio itself. No naval architect of record and no classification society is named on M/Y 115 as of publication, so none of those numbers has had independent engineering sign-off.

What a project like this would actually cost

Marco Ferrari has not published a price, and at concept stage there is no build contract to price. The closest honest estimate comes from the wider market: Ocean Independence's 2026 cost guide puts fully custom construction above roughly 70 to 80 metres at close to GBP 1 million per metre, a figure that has held since the order surge of 2021-22 pushed yards' books out for years. Applied loosely to 115 metres, that points to a hull in the GBP 100 million-plus range before outfitting, the submarine, the tenders or the interior fit are added, and well before any premium a first-of-type explorer at a top yard would carry. For scale, Feadship's 89.6-metre Milky Way, delivered days ago at a fraction under this length, and the 106-metre former Amadea, which sold for 187 million dollars in August, sit either side of what a real yacht near this size actually changes hands for.

The submarine adds a separate, largely unpublished line item. Depth-rated personal submersibles from established builders such as Triton or U-Boat Worx that reach even a few hundred metres typically run into several million dollars each before the launch-and-recovery system that a superyacht needs to operate one safely; a unit rated to 1,000 metres, at the deep end of what any manufacturer currently certifies for private use, would sit well above that. None of this is broken out in the M/Y 115 release. What is not published is, in this case, most of what a buyer would need to know: no yard quote, no interior designer, no naval architect, and no confirmation that a client is paying for any of it.

The honest trade: what is real and what is not yet

The strengths are concrete, not just brochure language. The owner's deck is a genuine full-beam private floor, apartment, studio, wardrobe and observation lounge kept apart from eight further guest cabins, and that cabin math is directly comparable to a built yacht's general arrangement plan. The optional Ice Class 1D notation is a real, checkable specification, not a marketing word, and if delivered as drawn would put the boat in the same high-latitude explorer category as SeaXplorer or Bering rather than a coastal cruiser dressed up as an expedition yacht. The toy and tender list is itemised down to hull lengths, which is the kind of detail a buyer can actually plan an itinerary around.

Set against that: there is no yard, no named client and no keel, so every number, the 7,000-nautical-mile range, the 5,000 GT, the battery capacity, is the studio's own unverified claim. The studio's release record shows six or more speculative concepts since 2019 without a confirmed match to a delivered yacht built exactly as drawn, so the base rate for a rendering like this becoming a real boat is low. And the Nemo Lounge name, carried over from M80 two months earlier, suggests a reused feature rather than a bespoke answer to this owner's brief. None of that makes M/Y 115 dishonest work, concept studios exist to test ideas before a client commits, but it does mean the design should be read as a proposal, not a yacht.

What happens next

The realistic path from here runs through a boat show and a relationship, not a press release. Concepts at this scale are typically shown to owners already talking to a yard the studio works with, or floated at events such as the Monaco Yacht Show in September, where several builders debut projects still short of a signed contract. The next real milestone to watch for is not another rendering but a named shipyard, a signed letter of intent, or a keel-laying date, any of which would move M/Y 115 from a design study to an actual order.

Until one of those appears, Yotters is treating M/Y 115 as exactly what the studio has published: a proposal for what a 115-metre exploration yacht could look like, not a yacht that exists or has an owner. The difference matters to anyone using a concept like this to think about a next newbuild, because a rendering can promise a 1,000-metre submarine and a 7,000-mile range for free. A yard, a class society and a keel are what turn those numbers into a boat.