Pinto

The Photographer Who Became Paris's Decorator

Alberto Pinto was born in Casablanca in 1943 to Sephardic parents and studied at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris before moving to New York, where he ran a photography agency shooting interiors and architecture for magazines. Redecorating his own Manhattan apartment in the 1960s changed the direction of his career: friends and editors who saw it began asking him to do the same for their own homes, and the requests grew into a decoration practice rather than a photography one. He returned to Paris and opened his own agency, taking rooms in a seventeenth century private residence at Place des Victoires. Trade sources disagree on the exact founding year, with 1968 cited in some accounts and 1971 in others, and neither Pinto's own site nor the Wikipedia entry on him resolves it, so this profile treats the early 1970s as the safest description.

From that base the practice grew into one of the broadest decoration houses in Paris, taking on private residences and palaces across the Americas, the Middle East and Europe alongside hotel commissions that eventually included the Lanesborough and the Dorchester in London. Yacht and private jet work became a visible part of the practice well before Alberto Pinto's death, with a Boeing 747 interior and superyacht commissions running in parallel with the residential side. By the time Linda Pinto gave a 2017 interview to Designboom, she described a studio of 80 people in Paris and said the house had designed interiors for 10 of the 100 largest yachts in the world, a figure this profile could not independently verify beyond her own statement.

Three Leaders in Fifty Years

When Alberto Pinto died in 2012, Linda Pinto, his sister and long serving deputy, later described the choice bluntly: close the office or keep it running. She chose to continue, having joined her brother's world at 17 after following him to Paris and managing a furniture gallery he had opened, and she ran the roughly 60 to 80 person studio for the next nine years. Her daughter Davina Koskas separately built Pinto Paris, a porcelain, furniture and tableware brand that extends the Pinto aesthetic into retail goods sold through dealers such as Maison Gerard and platforms like The Invisible Collection, and which this profile treats as a related but distinct operation from the interior design house itself, since the two are staffed, directed and reported on separately.

Linda Pinto retired in 2021. By then Fahad Hariri, an architect trained at the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris and a longtime Pinto client who had commissioned the house for several of his own residences, had already acquired a controlling interest, formalized on 10 August 2020 through his holding company taking the president's seat at the operating entity, Pinto Decoration. Hariri now holds the title of co-artistic director alongside Pietro Scaglione, who has been with the house more than twenty years and provides the continuity between the founder's era and the current one. In 2026 the house's own company directory entry recorded a further step, describing a new visual identity and name, PINTO, replacing the long-used Alberto Pinto Interior Design, organized into a Decoration branch for projects and a Collections branch for furniture and tableware.

A Pinto interior reads as Paris decoration transplanted onto a hull, lacquer, coral prints and Art Deco showmanship built by a house that has changed hands twice since its founder died and has not delivered a confirmed new superyacht since 2014.

The Delivered Fleet

The earliest confirmed Pinto yacht interior in current circulation is Nita K II, a 52 metre Amels delivered in 2004 with Pinto working alongside designer Laura Sessa. Oceanco delivered AHS, a 66 metre, in 2005, rebuilt in 2020 and still carrying Pinto's cream furniture and Macassar, ebony and sycamore joinery. Oceanco's 82 metre Alfa Nero followed in 2007, exteriors by Nuvolari Lenard, and won Best Interior Design, Motor Yacht at the 2008 World Superyacht Awards along with a ShowBoats Design Award for best motor yacht over 75 metres; her rooms move between Pop Art color and a lacquered red Art Deco entrance foyer built around a glass lift and curved stair. Lurssen delivered two Pinto interiors the following year: the 110 metre Dilbar, exteriors by Tim Heywood, later renamed Ona and then Al Raya when Usmanov commissioned a larger yacht of the same name and sold the original to the Bahraini royal family, and the 78.4 metre Madsummer, exteriors by Espen Oeino, later renamed TV.

Dunya Yachts delivered its 72.5 metre flagship Axioma, originally named Red Square, in 2013, with a Pinto interior built around a double height main saloon and mezzanine lounge that won a Judges' Special Commendation at the 2014 World Superyacht Awards. Oceanco delivered the 85.6 metre St Princess Olga, known during construction as Y708, in the same year, exteriors by Igor Lobanov, winning Best Yacht Design over 50 Metres at the 2013 World Yacht Trophies. The largest confirmed Pinto interior is Ocean Victory, a 140 metre Fincantieri delivered in December 2014 with exteriors by Espen Oeino, at the time the largest yacht ever built in Italy. General summaries of Pinto's yacht work sometimes name Feadship among the studio's yards; this profile could not confirm a specific Feadship delivery with a Pinto interior and has left it out rather than repeat an unverified builder credit.

What a Commission Actually Costs

Neither pinto.fr nor any interview or trade profile found for this entry states what Pinto charges to design a yacht interior. That silence covers both eras of the house: no fee ever surfaced during Alberto Pinto's lifetime or Linda Pinto's stewardship, and nothing has been published since Fahad Hariri's 2020 acquisition either. General yacht design cost guides, not specific to Pinto, put design and engineering fees at roughly 10 to 20 percent of total build cost for a custom project, rising toward 25 to 30 percent for the most heavily customized work, per DRAFTXL's 2026 custom yacht design cost guide, though that figure bundles naval architecture and structural engineering with interior design rather than pricing decoration alone.

A prospective owner has one adjacent data point rather than a real benchmark: Pinto's furniture, lighting and tableware are sold as standalone retail goods through the Pinto Paris and PINTO Collections lines, via dealers such as Maison Gerard and platforms including The Invisible Collection, at ordinary retail prices for museum quality French cabinetmaking and hand painted Limoges porcelain. Buying a side table or a dinner service through those channels is a retail purchase, not a design commission, and it tells a buyer nothing about what a full yacht interior contract would cost. On a semi-custom or full-custom yacht, the interior design contract would ordinarily sit between the owner or yard and the studio, negotiated per project, exactly as with the comparable large decoration houses working in the same market.

How Pinto Compares to the Field

The clearest evidence of that decorator's sensibility is Alfa Nero's entrance foyer, a lacquered red Art Deco set piece built around a glass lift and curved staircase, paired elsewhere on the same yacht with Pop Art color schemes and coral print upholstery in the dining room. That range across period styles on a single vessel reflects a house built on decades of residential, hotel and palace work rather than one built for yachts alone, and it draws on a deep bench of French artisans and cabinetmakers who move between furniture for the Pinto Paris retail line and joinery destined for a yacht saloon.

That structure sets Pinto apart from marine-only studios such as Sinot Yacht Architecture and Design, Winch Design or Reymond Langton, which run dedicated superyacht teams and have delivered new interiors continuously through the 2020s. Pinto's confirmed yacht portfolio, by contrast, is entirely legacy work: eight named deliveries running from 2004 to 2014, and no new build confirmed under either Linda Pinto's later stewardship or Fahad Hariri's ownership since 2020. For an owner today, that means hiring Pinto for a yacht most plausibly means a refit or an interior built for a resale candidate among its own earlier fleet, rather than a ground-up new-build commission of the kind a dedicated marine studio would offer.

Where the Limits Are

No scandal, lawsuit or design controversy turned up in the trade press, brokerage listings or corporate records reviewed for this profile. The practical gap is a decade-long one: Ocean Victory in 2014 is the most recent confirmed Pinto yacht delivery this profile could verify, and neither the studio's own site nor any yacht trade database lists a newer one, spanning both the end of Linda Pinto's tenure and the whole of Fahad Hariri's ownership so far. A prospective owner cannot currently point to a recent example of the house's yacht work the way they could with a studio delivering new interiors every year.

A second limitation is the studio's own naming history. Pinto Paris, now most associated with Davina Koskas's porcelain and furniture retail line, is a name the wider public and even some yacht trade directories still use interchangeably with the interior design house itself, which now formally goes only by PINTO. A buyer researching the studio has to work past that overlap to confirm which entity actually designs full yacht interiors. A third gap is testimony: no named owner, captain or broker commentary evaluating a Pinto yacht interior specifically turned up in Boat International, Superyacht Times, Robb Report or major brokerage write-ups reviewed for this profile, leaving award citations and yard press as the only record of how the work performs in use.

Where the Studio Is Headed

Since taking over, Hariri has pursued collaborations that broaden Pinto's design language beyond its historic decorative range: a 2022 furniture capsule collection with fashion designer Stefano Pilati, and a partnership with wallpaper and textile house de Gournay. Hariri has described his own ambition for the house in terms of emotion and human experience rather than a fixed period style, saying he wants interiors that carry intellectual and cultural relevance rather than simply extending Alberto Pinto's original vocabulary unchanged.

The clearest recent structural move is the 2026 rebrand recorded in the house's own company directory listing, dropping Alberto Pinto Interior Design for the plain mark PINTO across a Decoration branch and a Collections branch. Pinto's own website still lists Yachting as one of four project categories alongside Residential, Aviation and Hospitality, so the studio has not withdrawn from the category in its own presentation, but this profile found no announced new-build yacht project, launch or delivery under the current ownership to point to, which means the yacht side of Pinto's story is, for now, a historical one rather than an active pipeline.

Для кого: An owner drawn to a decorator's eye rather than a naval architect's, who wants Parisian Art Deco and Baroque reference points on board and is buying or refitting an existing large yacht rather than commissioning a brand-new Pinto-designed build.