Staluppi's Bilgin Flagship Project Bond Gets Its Art Deco Interior

What did Bilgin just unveil, and why does it matter?

Bilgin Yachts has released the interior concept for Project Bond, the 82-metre flagship it is building for John Staluppi, showing a modern Art Deco interior by H2 Yacht Design layered onto a hull that is still under construction at the yard's Turkish facility.

The reveal, reported by SuperYacht Times on 26 August 2026, covers the interior only: Project Bond's hull and general arrangement were already known from the yacht's sale, announced at the Palm Beach International Boat Show in the spring, but the finished look of her interior spaces had not been shown before. Bilgin calls the boat a true owner-led flagship, and the description is more than marketing: the yard says every element of the layout answers a brief set directly by Staluppi and his wife, Jeanette, rather than a standard specification sheet. At 82 metres, Project Bond becomes Bilgin's largest yacht to date, surpassing the yard's existing trio of 80-metre flagships, Tatiana, Leona and Al Reem, on the same 263 platform.

Unique Yacht Design's Emrecan Ozgun drew the exterior and naval architecture, while Jonny Horsfield of H2 Yacht Design shaped the interior. The pairing puts an established Bilgin exterior partner alongside a British interior studio Staluppi has worked with before, and the result Bilgin is showing is deliberately light-driven: floor-to-ceiling glazing runs through the main living spaces, intended to blur the line between the interior and the sea rather than frame it through conventional windows. FGI Yacht Group's Simon Graham, the broker who helped place the sale, frames the whole project around a change in what Staluppi wants from a yacht at this stage of his life: "For him, this is about creating lasting memories rather than chasing the next build."

Who is John Staluppi, and why does his 18th yacht look different?

Staluppi is a Brooklyn-born entrepreneur who has commissioned or owned 18 yachts, every one of them named after a James Bond film, and Project Bond marks a deliberate style shift away from the contemporary interior of his last H2-designed yacht toward Art Deco.

Few current owners have as long or as public a yachting history as Staluppi. His 18-yacht run, each one named for a Bond title, has made his fleet a recognisable thread through decades of yacht building, and his boats have consistently paired high speed and bold styling with a focus on entertaining and guest experience rather than quiet understatement. According to H2 Yacht Design founder Jonny Horsfield, Staluppi had previously owned an H2-designed yacht with a contemporary interior, and for Project Bond he went looking for something different: two of the studio's earlier interiors, done in a modern interpretation of Art Deco, caught his attention and became the starting point for the new design. That is a specific, traceable design decision, not a generic brief, and it is the kind of detail that only shows up once an owner has worked with a studio long enough to know its full range.

Horsfield has described the practical constraint sitting underneath the styling: Staluppi and Jeanette live aboard for many weeks each year, so the interior has to work as a home first, glamour second. "The clients live onboard for many weeks a year so primarily the interior has to be liveable and comfortable; however, I'm definitely trying to create a grand rich style and a definite WOW factor," Horsfield said. That balance, comfort underneath spectacle, is the same logic that runs through Staluppi's choice of yard: he has said he picked Bilgin for its flexibility and willingness to adapt to his brief, engineering the boat for a shallow draft that reaches harbours an 82-metre yacht usually cannot enter while still delivering the range and speed of a global cruiser.

What is actually inside Project Bond?

The interior centres on a main saloon done in Horsfield's modern Art Deco style, an owner's deck bar built for entertaining, and an open staircase connecting the saloon directly to the beach club, with Jeanette Staluppi shaping how the spaces are used rather than just how they look.

Horsfield singles out the main saloon as the interior's highlight, saying it captures the modern Art Deco mood most completely, and points to the open staircase linking the saloon to the beach club as a rare feature at this scale: connecting the two so openly, he says, is unusual on a yacht of any size, let alone an 82-metre flagship where fire-safety and structural bulkheads normally push circulation into enclosed stairwells. Among the spaces Staluppi has singled out as personal to him is the owner's deck bar, which he describes simply as a place to get together with guests and have a real conversation, a small but telling detail from an owner whose 18 previous yachts have all been built around entertaining.

Jeanette Staluppi's role goes beyond selecting finishes. Bilgin and H2 both describe her as shaping the yacht's entertainment and relaxation areas and how those spaces are actually lived in day to day, not just how they present in a rendering. Horsfield frames Project Bond as proof that Bilgin's 263 platform can carry very different interior identities on the same hull: Tatiana, Leona and Al Reem, the yard's existing three 80-metre sisters, already show distinct looks and layouts within the same naval architecture, and he calls Project Bond the most fully optimised version of that platform yet, describing it as "the ultimate iteration of this series."

What does Project Bond signal for Bilgin and Turkish yacht building?

Project Bond is Bilgin's biggest and most complex build to date, timed to a deliberate push into the American market, and its scale is a marker of how far Turkish yards have moved up the size ladder in custom construction over the past few years.

Bilgin's Commercial Director, Berkay Yilmaz, has tied the project directly to the yard's US strategy: "The American market has become increasingly important to Bilgin Yachts. Over the past years, we have secured several significant contracts from clients across North and South America." Project Bond was engineered with that market specifically in mind, with a shallow 3.6-metre draft and 13-metre beam chosen to open up harbours along the US East Coast and the Bahamas that larger, deeper-draft yachts cannot reach, while a published range beyond 5,000 nautical miles and a top speed of 17.5 knots keep her capable of genuine ocean crossings. She is built with a steel hull and aluminium superstructure and powered by twin MTU engines, giving a cruising speed of 15 knots.

The sale itself, concluded by Yilmaz alongside Graham and yachting advisor Peter Thompson, was the third new-build Bilgin and FGI Yacht Group have completed together, evidence of a repeat relationship rather than a one-off deal. During a visit to the yard, Staluppi praised the quality of the workmanship on Project Bond directly, singling out the welding and the fit and finish of the steel and aluminium work, an owner's on-site assessment that carries more weight than a press release because it comes from a buyer with 18 yachts of comparison behind him. No delivery date or price has been published, and until Project Bond is launched, everything about how the finished Art Deco interior actually reads in person, rather than in a rendering, remains Bilgin's and H2's claim to prove.