Royal Huisman's Project 410, World's Largest Sloop, Nears Launch

What did Royal Huisman actually reveal about Project 410 at Monaco?

Royal Huisman used the 2026 Monaco Yacht Show to unveil new visuals and construction detail on Project 410, the 85-metre sloop it has kept almost entirely out of public view since the contract was announced in 2022. The yard says she has now entered her final stage of completion at Vollenhove, with transport to a deepwater launch site near Amsterdam scheduled for November.

Royal Huisman first revealed the commission at the St Barths Bucket Regatta in 2022, giving her the working nickname 85M New World Sloop and promising interiors that would almost literally transport guests into a new world. Almost nothing followed for two years. The next public look came in July 2024, when the yard turned the bare aluminium hull upright inside its extended construction hall in Vollenhove to mark its 140th anniversary, an event photographed by Tom Van Oossanen and, at the time, the only image of the yacht in circulation. Not even a rendering had been shown before that day.

The Monaco unveiling closes that gap with the first public interior imagery and a clear run of dates: final completion work now underway at Vollenhove, transport to the yard's deepwater site near Amsterdam in November 2026, and stepping of her mast to follow. Royal Huisman's chief executive, Peter Naeye, called the project an extraordinary combination of vision, scale and innovation, adding that seeing her approach completion after four years made the team immensely proud. What the announcement does not give is a delivery date to her owner, which remains unpublished even at this stage.

Why did Wetzels Brown design the interior before Frers Design fixed the hull?

Royal Huisman built Project 410 in reverse of the usual order. Wetzels Brown developed the interior experience first, as the foundation the yacht's architecture had to serve, before Frers Design fixed the naval architecture and exterior around it.

Gillian Brown of Wetzels Brown described the approach directly: for us, the interior is about creating an environment where people can relax, feel close to the sea and create memories, and the exterior, interior and experience of sailing have been developed as one continuous expression. In practice that means a double-height main entrance leading to the salon, with the veranda aft connecting directly to a beach club so the sequence runs uninterrupted from indoors to shade to sunlight to water. Forward of the salon, daylight guides the transition toward a private owner's suite that Royal Huisman says occupies its own dedicated deck.

Frers Design then had to build a hull form that could carry two decks of living space around a single mast without losing the proportions of a sailing yacht, a harder brief than it sounds at 85 metres. Mani Frers described the resulting profile as pure deck lines forming a single arrow shape from bow to stern, incorporating the glass pilothouse, with the raked mast and a purpose-engineered boom reinforcing the dynamic line. Extra-large hull windows and skylights bring daylight and a view of the mast itself into rooms that would otherwise sit below deck level on a boat this size, the specific trade the interior-first process was designed to protect.

What makes Project 410's rig and systems different from a typical superyacht sloop?

Rondal, Royal Huisman's sister company, built the carbon mast, boom and integrated sailing system, and the yacht carries the same energy-regeneration and silent-at-anchor technology the yard first proved on Ethereal, the 2008 yacht it calls the world's first hybrid superyacht under sail or power. The brief was an 85-metre sloop that actually sails, not one that is simply rigged to.

Royal Huisman's stated design intent is a true sailor's yacht: elegant and comfortable, ready to sail in a matter of minutes, and capable of rewarding performance even in lighter airs, a target most large sailing superyachts do not chase because it works against comfort and volume. Frers Design started from a hull form that gives two decks of volume around a single mast and a proportionally small deckhouse, then combined a low draft with high stability so the yacht can reach anchorages at very low heel angles, and relatively high freeboards to protect privacy on deck without adding the top hamper that would work against her sailing manners.

The technical platform draws directly on Ethereal's hybrid systems: energy regeneration while under sail, a large-capacity battery bank, and the ability to run in a silent mode at anchor with no generator noise working through the hull. Royal Huisman had this technology in service on a sailing yacht nearly two decades before Project 410, the difference between an idea a yard is trying for the first time and one it is scaling up. None of it has been tested on a hull this size yet. Sea trials, and the mast-stepping that has to happen before them, are still ahead once she reaches the Amsterdam-area launch site in November.

How long has Project 410 actually taken to build, and is Royal Huisman building another one?

Four years separate the 2022 contract announcement from November 2026's transport to Amsterdam for launch, and Royal Huisman has not published when sea trials will finish or when the yacht reaches her owner. She is also not the only super-sized sloop in the yard's shed: a second one, Project 412, is under construction at Vollenhove at the same time.

The build required Royal Huisman to extend Hall 2 at Vollenhove just to fit the hull, and the yard treated the July 2024 hull turning as a milestone significant enough to mark alongside its own 140th anniversary. Jan Timmerman, Royal Huisman's chief executive at the time, used the occasion to place Project 410 in a wider context, naming the yard's existing 90-metre Athena and 81-metre Sea Eagle alongside Project 410 and a second super-sized sloop then still under construction as four of the world's ten largest sailing yachts either built by or building at Royal Huisman. That second yacht, Project 412, has since reached its own hull-turning milestone.

Once complete, Project 410 will rank as the largest sloop-rigged sailing yacht ever built and will join Athena and Sea Eagle among the ten largest sailing superyachts afloat, all three from the same yard. For an owner comparing yards on sheer capability at this scale, that is a harder claim to match than a single flagship: Royal Huisman is not simply attempting a record, it is running two record-scale sloop builds through the same shed at once.

Is Project 410 worth taking seriously against a motoryacht of similar length, and what is still unconfirmed?

Project 410 offers a buyer weighing a sailing flagship against an equivalent motoryacht a case built on real precedent: a record scale, an interior-first design process, and hybrid technology already proven at sea for eighteen years. Against that sit four unresolved questions: no price, no published guest count, no delivery date and no service history for a rig this large.

The strongest points in Project 410's favour are specific rather than promotional. She will be the largest sloop ever built and will join two other Royal Huisman yachts in the world's sailing top ten, a claim no other yard can currently match with three boats from one shed. The interior-first process that Wetzels Brown led is unusual enough that Royal Huisman felt it worth explaining in its own words rather than folding it into a standard specification sheet. And the hybrid systems on board are not a new idea being tried for the first time. They are a mature technology, proven on Ethereal since 2008, being scaled to a much larger hull.

What has not been published is just as telling. Royal Huisman has confirmed a November transport date and a mast-stepping to follow it, but not a sea trial schedule or a handover date to the owner, four years after the contract was signed. Neither the yard nor any broker has stated a price, and no cabin count or guest capacity has been made public, unusual for a project this far along its build. A carbon mast, boom and sailing system engineered specifically for an 85-metre hull also has no service record yet. The yard's claim that she will sail in a matter of minutes and reward light air is a design target until she has actually done it. For a prospective owner, that combination, a proven builder taking a genuinely new risk, is either the whole appeal or the whole caution, depending on how much the word first is worth to them.