SAN

A 45-Metre Yacht Built Around One Sightline

Delivered by the Turkish yard Alia Yachts on 26 June 2024, the 45-metre SAN began as a two-year design collaboration between the yard's president Gokhan Celik and Paul Costerus, a partner at the Dutch studio Sinot Yacht Architecture and Design. The two met at the Monaco Yacht Show, where Celik has said he effectively grabbed Costerus and pulled him into a meeting with the client on the spot. The brief that came out of that meeting was unusually direct: the owner wanted to be able to step aboard at the stern and see clear to the bow, with nothing in between. That single requirement ruled out the layout every other yacht this size uses, where a forward bridge deck and enclosed wheelhouse break the main deck in two.

Alia had tested the idea before, on two smaller 27-metre yachts, Atlantico and 0110, both built with open-plan main decks. SAN scales that idea up to full-custom superyacht size for the first time, with a main saloon lowered 60 centimetres below the surrounding deck so that a raised, externally accessed pilothouse could sit above it without blocking the view. Costerus has described the resulting bridge as looking almost like a fighter jet cockpit, tucked in beneath the mast rather than spanning the beam. Keel was laid on 10 January 2022 and SAN launched in March 2024, so the full build ran a little over two years from steel-cutting to delivery.

The Owner's Brief and How Sinot Solved It

Costerus has recounted the moment the brief was set: the client said 'When I step on board, I need to see the bow,' and Costerus recalls asking, half joking, where the boat would actually be steered from. The answer was the raised pod bridge that now defines SAN's profile, reached by an external stair rather than an internal companionway, so it adds no visual bulk to the deck below. Alia's engineers built the main saloon down into the hull by 60 centimetres specifically to buy back the headroom the raised bridge would otherwise have taken from the deck plan, a compromise that let both spaces work without cutting ceiling height in the saloon.

The tradeoff is real and worth naming plainly: SAN gives up the sheltered forward bridge deck that most yachts this size use for indoor-outdoor entertaining space, and her captain works from a smaller, more exposed pilothouse than is typical at 45 metres. In exchange, the yacht gets a main deck that reads as one continuous room from the transom to the forward glazing, floor-to-ceiling and virtually unbroken by structure. The owner's other main reference point was Pi, the Sinot-designed Feadship known for its oversized glazing, and SAN's window wall was conceived explicitly as an answer to that yacht at less than half the length.

Engineering the Glass and the Bulwarks

Firad Ozturk, Alia's project manager on the build, has said the unique shape of the superstructure made it impossible to install the windows in a single step, which required the yard to develop new solutions on the fly rather than following a standard glazing sequence used on smaller Alia projects. The panels themselves are compound-curved rather than flat, narrow-mullioned to keep the sightlines as clean as the brief demanded, and large enough that a single misjudged fit could have meant re-ordering custom glass from scratch. Alia mitigated that risk by trialling full-size dummy panels in position before the actual glazing was ordered and installed, an unusually cautious step that reflects how little margin for error the design allowed.

The same discipline shows in SAN's folding bulwarks, hydraulically operated sections roughly 5.4 metres long on each side of the aft deck that open outward to extend the usable beam from 8.89 metres to about 11.5 metres and turn the stern into a 70 square metre beach club. Interior fit-out followed the same reductive brief: Sinot specified just 15 materials for the entire yacht, among them teak, stained oak, eucalyptus and tan leather, and almost all of the furniture, aside from a Soraman dining table and Cassina chairs, was custom-built by Alia rather than sourced from a catalogue. Butterfly-jointed woodwork and saddle-stitched leather panels carry that same made-to-order standard through spaces that, on a less disciplined build, would have been filled with off-the-shelf pieces.

Power, Range and What SAN Is Not

SAN's four Volvo Penta D13-IPS engines produce 700hp each, 2,800hp combined, and drive Volvo Penta's IPS pod units rather than a conventional shaftline, so there is no separate gearbox to speak of. That IPS installation is one reason the semi-displacement aluminium hull reaches 23 knots flat out and cruises comfortably at 18, figures that put SAN closer to a fast lifestyle yacht than to the slow-turning, long-legged explorer type some 45-metre full-custom buyers default to. Fuel capacity is 43,680 litres and freshwater tankage is 13,360 litres, giving the quoted 1,400 nautical mile range at 18 knots, a number repeated consistently across YachtBuyer and YachtCharterFleet listings.

That range is the clearest tradeoff on the boat: comparable 45-metre full-custom yachts built for genuine long-range cruising commonly advertise 3,500 to 4,000 nautical miles or more, well beyond what SAN carries. Three Kohler generators of 70kW each cover hotel load, and the yacht carries both underway and at-anchor stabilisation, though no press source found in this research names the stabiliser manufacturer or the bow thruster specification, an unusual gap for a yacht this thoroughly covered editorially. Buyers comparing SAN to a true explorer should treat the range figure as a deliberate design choice tied to the IPS propulsion and the open-plan brief, not a shortfall against a spec sheet Alia never tried to hit.

Recognition, Price and What Buyers Should Know

The World Superyacht Awards judging panel called SAN 'so wonderfully different' and said she 'changes your thinking about what is possible in a yacht layout' when handing her the 2025 category win, a genuinely independent assessment since the judges inspect entered yachts in person rather than relying only on builder material. That award followed a run of first-look features across Boat International, Yachts International, Barche Magazine and Pressmare through late 2024 and into 2025, all describing the same dayboat-inspired concept and crediting Sinot and Lateral Naval Architects for the design and naval architecture respectively. No source found in this research disputes any of the core specification numbers, which is itself notable given how unusual the layout is.

What none of that coverage includes is a price. Alia Yachts has never published a build cost for SAN, no brokerage or resale listing has surfaced since her June 2024 delivery, and YachtCharterFleet and CharterWorld both list her as privately operated rather than available to charter. For context, Alia's older 60-metre Samurai, a steel-and-aluminium yacht from 2016, was on the brokerage market in 2025 asking around 39.5 million euros after a price reduction, which gives some sense of where the yard's larger full-custom work trades, but it is not a substitute for a real number on SAN herself. A buyer or broker asking what SAN cost new, or what she would fetch today, is asking a question this research could not answer from any published source.

Design

Для кого: Buyers who want a full-custom 45-metre yacht built for entertaining and open-plan living rather than ocean crossings, and who will accept a smaller, externally accessed wheelhouse and a shorter range than a dedicated explorer in exchange for an unbroken bow-to-stern view most yachts this size cannot offer.

Ориентировочная цена: No build price has ever been published for SAN. Alia's older 60-metre Samurai (2016) was asking around EUR 39.5 million on the brokerage market in 2025 after a price cut, the only public reference point for how the yard's larger full-custom work trades, and it should not be read as a proxy for SAN's own value.