Tankoa's 51.5m Spirit puts a spa where the toys used to go
A wellness deck floated out at Genoa
Tankoa Yachts launched its custom T52 Vitruvius, now named Spirit, from its Genoa yard on 11 July 2026. The 51.5-metre motor yacht carries naval architecture and exterior lines by Vitruvius Yachts, the London studio led by Philippe Briand and Veerle Battiau, with interiors by the Ancona practice FM Architettura. She sleeps up to 12 guests in six cabins and nine crew in five, and runs a full-hybrid propulsion package from E-motion, with a top speed of 17 knots and a 15-knot cruise. Tankoa says the yacht has now entered final outfitting, with sea trials under way ahead of delivery to her owner later this year.
The centrepiece is the aft beach club, which Tankoa built around a gym and a spa that open onto a full-width terrace at the stern. A plunge pool sits on the aft deck, fold-down side platforms extend the floor area toward the water, and a two-section glazed stern door with full-height side glazing brings light and sightlines into a space that on many yachts is handed to jet skis and dive gear. Noise and vibration work was carried out by van Cappellen Consultancy, a detail that matters more for a treatment room than for a toy store.
The brief has moved wellness to the stern
Spirit reads as one clear example of a shift that BOAT International and several yard newsrooms have tracked through 2026, where owners commission wellness space early in the design rather than fitting a gym around the machinery once everything else is placed. On Spirit that logic reaches the beach club, the one part of the yacht in direct contact with the sea, which builders have long used for tenders, toys and a bar. Putting the spa and gym there trades some garage volume for daylight and direct access to the water.
For an owner, the location is the whole point. A treatment room buried on a lower deck is just a room. A spa that opens onto the water at anchor is a reason to buy the boat. It also travels well into the charter market, where guests increasingly ask for recovery and fitness programming over a bigger club. A buyer weighing a resale or a new build can read Spirit as a market signal that wellness square-metres near the waterline now hold value, and that a conventional toy-garage layout may date faster than it once did.
Hybrid running is what makes a spa at sea work
Spirit's full-hybrid drive from E-motion pairs conventional engines with electric motors and batteries, which lets the yacht run quietly at low load and hold hotel systems at anchor without the main engines turning. Combined with the van Cappellen vibration package, that is the practical enabler behind the wellness brief, because a massage or a cold plunge is undermined by engine drone and hull buzz. The interior design and the machinery are aimed at the same result.
For a prospective owner, the lesson is to specify the quiet before the finishes. Hybrid propulsion, resilient mounts and acoustic engineering are hard to retrofit and cheap to plan, and they decide whether a spa deck performs or merely photographs well. Tankoa has not published gross tonnage, range or interior volumes for Spirit, so buyers comparing her against rivals should ask the yard for verified figures rather than launch-day descriptions. The wider read is simpler, in that a beach club given to health is now a saleable position, and the yards are building to it.