Two Siblings Built Celestia, a 45m Phinisi, to Reunite Their Family

A Crazy Idea, Pitched Mid-Lockdown

Jason Tabalujan, a private equity fund manager based in Jakarta, pitched his sister with a warning first: "I said, 'Hey, I have a crazy idea, do you want to hear about my crazy idea?'" The idea was building a yacht - specifically, a 45-metre traditional Indonesian phinisi to bring their pandemic-scattered family back together in the Coral Triangle waters both had grown up sailing. Jasmine Chong, a New York-based fashion designer, remembers her own reaction as pure disbelief: "I was like, 'I'm a fashion designer.' It felt crazy." Neither sibling had built a boat before, and the pandemic had already separated their extended family across Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore - the same three countries their parents' families trace back to - for months at a stretch.

Tabalujan did not wait for full family buy-in before committing. He told the rest of the family about the project only once he had already sunk half his money into it, "at a point where it couldn't be stopped" - a deliberate tactic to keep a genuinely uncertain, expensive project from being talked out of existence before it had a hull. Chong, for her part, found something clarifying rather than reckless about starting a multi-year build during a period when nobody could travel anywhere: "There was something very nice about dreaming of this project," she has said of conceiving Celestia while locked down and unable to see the family the boat was meant to reunite.

Building in Bulukumba, Not Rotterdam

Celestia was not built in any of the yards this desk normally covers. It was hand-built in Bulukumba, on the South Sulawesi coast of Indonesia - the traditional home of Bugis phinisi shipbuilding, where two-masted wooden schooners have been laid down by hand, without formal naval-architecture drawings in the Western sense, for generations. That choice put the siblings' project inside a craft tradition rather than an industrial supply chain: no steel plate, no CNC-cut frames, no delivery-date guarantees from a yard used to building to a fixed program. The vessel launched in a traditional peluncuran ceremony in 2022, after a build timeline that stretched well beyond what a European or Turkish yard would quote for a comparable-sized new construction.

That trade-off is the real story behind Celestia for any owner considering the same route: a Bulukumba build buys authenticity, craft and a genuinely one-off vessel that no production yard could replicate, at the cost of the delivery predictability, warranty structure and standardised parts sourcing that come with a Western or Turkish steel yard. Neither sibling has published what the build cost, and there is no indication either treated the schedule as fixed - the project reads, by their own account, as something closer to a multi-year family commission than a yacht ordered off a spec sheet.

A Fashion Designer's Interior, Built Around Colour-Blindness

Creative direction on Celestia's interior fell to Chong specifically because Tabalujan is colour-blind - a practical division of labour between the two owners rather than a shared design-by-committee process. Chong approached the interior the way she approaches a garment: "A lot like making a dress, where you think about the fabric, what kind of material to use, how it's going to move," she has said, describing a fabric-first process that is unusual for a yacht interior and traces directly back to her day job. The result runs through hand-woven rattan panelling sourced from Java, hand-glazed traditional Balinese tiles in the wet areas, and tropical toile jacquard textiles that Chong designed herself rather than sourced from a marine upholstery catalogue.

None of those materials are typical superyacht-interior choices - rattan and glazed tile are humid-climate, regionally sourced materials that would be unusual specification on a Western-built yacht, and that is precisely the point of the project: Celestia was built to read as Indonesian rather than to read as a superyacht that happens to be cruising Indonesia. For an owner weighing a similar bespoke build, the lesson is that getting a genuinely regional design language onto a yacht requires putting an actual practitioner from that discipline - in this case a fashion designer, not a yacht-design studio - in charge of it.

Two Owners' Cabins and a Parents' Suite

Celestia carries seven cabins across her two masts and multiple decks, run by a crew of 17 drawn from Indonesia and other Bahasa-speaking regions. The layout's most telling detail is structural rather than decorative: twin, identical owners' cabins on the upper deck, one for Chong and one for Tabalujan, with neither sibling given a nominally superior primary suite - an unusual choice on a yacht with two owners, where one cabin is typically upgraded over the other. The main-deck cabin, meanwhile, was conceived specifically with their parents in mind, built around an expansive cushioned seating area where Chong says the family gravitates during their annual trips through the archipelago.

That cabin plan is effectively the whole thesis of the project rendered in square metreage: a boat designed to physically reunite a specific family rather than to maximise charter-guest capacity or resale appeal. Chong has described watching that plan work as designed - "This is the first of many happy moments on the boat," she said of an early family gathering aboard - and has spoken about the less obvious reward of genuine offshore darkness on the Coral Triangle routes: "How often do you really look up... In the city, you can't take in the stars."

From the Family's Boat to a Charter Fleet

Celestia now charters commercially around the Coral Triangle, running routes through Komodo - including drift-dive sites like Shotgun - the Banda Sea's Jackpot site, known for hammerhead sharks, plus Run Island in the Maluku Islands and Sumbawa's northern coast. The yacht's profile has extended beyond direct charter bookings: a five-day sailing aboard Celestia was included in the celebrity gift bags at the 2024 Golden Globes, a marketing reach well beyond what a typical Indonesian phinisi charter operation achieves.

What is not published is any standard day or weekly charter rate, and neither sibling has disclosed what the build itself cost - the Golden Globes gift-bag placement is, on the public record, the only concrete pricing signal tied to the yacht at all. For an owner or prospective charterer comparing Celestia to a Western-built explorer yacht on the same Indonesian cruising grounds, that absence of a rate card is itself informative: this remains, four years after launch, a family yacht that happens to take paying guests, not a charter-fleet asset run to a published rate sheet.