THE OCTANE INTERVIEW
Once he brought McLaren racing technology to road cars, now he’s all at sea with Princess Yachts. Stephen Bayley meets him on dry land
Princess Yachts CEO Antony Sheriff
ONE STARTLING THING I have noticed on my travels is that there is no positive correlation between the local environment and the beauty it stimulates. If anything, the opposite. Beautiful places do not always foster beautiful things.
Cornwall, for instance. Here you find sublime, natural landscape side-by-side with some of the ugliest architecture on Earth. Same goes,
I suppose, for Wales. Bentley makes gorgeous cars in Crewe, a benighted town of crushing mediocrity. And, if we are honest, while Modena is a very fine city, Maranello itself is a dump. If all of Italy were like Maranello, you would wonder what the fuss was about. Or take Epernay, the Champagne capital. The home of Moët & Chandon is a grim and cheerless place.
But it is Plymouth that, to exploit a naval term, really takes the hard tack in the aesthetic paradox argument. It is the most dismaying example of post-Hitler reconstruction I know: a more visually impoverished vista of poundstores, strip-lit kebab kiosks, bleak malls and the sort of violently gaudy pub you find in convalescent military cities could not be
imagined even in a fever dream. It has perhaps always been as bad: Plymouth was probably why The Pilgrim Fathers left in the first place.
Yet it is in Plymouth you find Princess Yachts, a world-leader in the design and manufacture of mid-size pleasure palaces for the all-at-sea rich. With an output of about 280 motor yachts a year and about 100 in-build at any given moment, Princess’s only rivals in its category are Sunseeker of Poole, Ferretti of Forli and Azimut of Viareggio.
And, hilariously, Princess’s offices and shipyards are sited on Stonehouse Creek, a watery inlet leading to the fearsome old Royal Naval Hospital, finished to an advanced design by Alexander Rovehead in 1765. Built as separate pavilions accommodating about 1200 wounded or diseased sailors, the through-draughts created helpful ventilation long before Florence Nightingale thought of the idea.
But Stonehouse Creek was notoriously malodorous. So much so that it soon became known as Shit Creek and can therefore claim to be the fons et origo of this delightful term. Since most people travelling up Shit Creek on the tide were on their way to hospital, to be seen up Shit Creek without a paddle meant there was likely no possibility of return.
Happily, I went up Shit Creek for more cheerful reasons. Although architect-types often enjoy sailing because it provides ample opportunity to fuss about cleats and shackles, fixtures and fittings, and my wife has crewed a 30m boat around Fastnet, I have no interest at all in the water and things that float on it. Indeed, I am with Dr Johnson, compiler of the immortal 1755 Dictionary, who thought being on a boat was like being in prison… with the added possibility of drowning.
But I am interested in manufacturing, in concepts of luxury and of style, of what things mean, and why we – or, in this case, more accurately ‘they’ – aspire to them. I am interested in what Thorstein Veblen called the ‘pecuniary canons of taste’. Which translates as ‘what money can buy’. And since none of these 280 Princess motor yachts costs less than about £5m, there are questions to be asked.
And there up Shit Creek to answer them is Antony Sheriff, ex-MIT, McKinsey and Fiat Auto. New Yorker, relaxed but engaged, a tad unkempt in an artful way. He joined Princess as executive chairman in 2016 after ten years at McLaren, where he oversaw introduction of its road cars with the quixotic commitment to apply racing technology to everyday use.
He has an understated sense of urgency. I suspect not many people argue with him because his conviction is so very evident. At a recent All-Party Parliamentary Historic Vehicles Group dinner, Sheriff made the point that no-one in the superyacht world had
previously applied high-end car aerodynamics to yacht design. They say some people whispered: nor has anyone made a Formula 1 car that floats.
Anyway, Sheriff is on a mission to bring McLaren’s level of technical mastery and aesthetic pistonnage to the sometimes more primitive culture of the mid-size motor-yacht. If the boating community could be compared to a flock of ducks, you could say some feathers have been lightly ruffled.
For many years, Princess used a respected, if traditional, Isle of Wight naval architect called Bernard Olesinski and, indeed, still does. But after all that time in Turin and Woking, Sheriff got to know Pininfarina and the Italian designers, and technology too. He is taking his Princess places she has never been before.
Sheriff talks the car design language with authority. I met him some years ago at a private dinner in Turin, hosted by the one-time head of Carrozzeria Bertone. He was comfortably at home in this cosmopolitan and multi-lingual milieu. Sheriff is soft-spoken, but very few people talk over him. He knows about ‘window graphics’ and ‘character lines’ but, to be blunt, so do I and I want to ask him other things instead. Starting with ‘What do I call these… things? Ships?’ To which he answers with a smile: ‘No. They are not ships. Nor are they boats. They are motor-yachts.’
With this ground-rule helpfully established, I explore materials. Small boats are, if desirable, made of wood. Superyachts are made of metal, usually in German yards often with a Bismarck connection, but Princess’s mid-market hulls are resin-infused, vacuum-formed GRP, a technology that Princess (founded in 1965 as Marine Projects Limited) has been using since 1970. And the sight of the larger ones, being painstakingly created in a factory that might have been designed by a 21st Century Piranesi, with boats on cradles, rails on the floor and an atmosphere of intense industry, is impressive.
The smell is impressive too, one of overwhelming volatiles. Then there are pleasing sights everywhere for the amateur of the Factory Visit. I enjoy the glint of sun off marinegrade alloy. Sheriff is an evangelist not just for his own product, but for the art and craft of making things as a cultural and economic system. Some people may smirk when I write this, but we both stand back and admire a black-water tank designed and fabricated on the premises. ‘We are keeping local traditions alive,’ he says, rightly pleased to be making the claim. Princess’s artisans all look absolutely engaged with their tasks. Making things makes people proud. It can’t be said often enough.
‘What,’ I then want to know, ‘is the manufacturing process once the hull has been formed?’ It goes like this. ‘One,’ Sheriff says, ‘first-stage joinery, plumbing and electrics.’ Princess makes its own wiring looms and keeps a painstaking record of every single one (since you have to be ever so careful about fire at sea). ‘Two,’ he continues, ‘second-stage joinery and
‘Sheriff iS on a miSSion to bring mcLaren’S LeveL of technicaL maStery to the more primitive cuLture of the motor-yacht’
engine installation. Three, mating the hull with the fly-bridge. Four, interior fit-out.’
Naturally, I want to know about the engines, or what on the water we must call ‘propulsion systems’. Afloat, there is a generally understood league division. Up to 1000hp it is Volvo. The middle-market is MAN but, for 2000hp and above, you go to MTU, Motoren und Turbinen Union, the company founded by Maybach and now owned by Rolls-Royce. Up Shit Creek, handsomely functional-looking Volvo Penta diesels, painted the finest of light greys, sit on wooden pallets, awaiting their missions to propel gin-and-tonic drinkers towards far horizons. I stroke one. Sheriff does too.
The scale of manufacturing at Princess astonishes me. ‘It’s all about vertical integration,’ Sheriff explains as I turn my stroking attention to a complex teak moulding, milled from the solid. On a Princess X95, there are 20 different door sizes alone. Is it cynical of me not to suggest to Sheriff that there is scope here for rationalisation? But then I see a beautiful phosphor-bronze rudder, Made In Plymouth, and I stop being snitty.
Sheriff estimates that there are 5000 movements of components on-site every single day and he tells me ‘80% of what you see, we make’. Perhaps a little like the original McLaren F1, I think to myself, where Gordon Murray even had titanium nuts and bolts custommade. Sheriff, probably correctly, claims, as he looks at galleys and saloons and banquettes and bars being fabricated, to be ‘one of the biggest furniture manufacturers in the UK’. On one site, at Coypool, a vast out-of-town estate inherited from the Ministry of Defence, they even make their own cleats. The more complex latches are, however, bought-in. As are the propellers: mighty Australian castings where a single inset nylon strip of surprising modesty moderates wasteful turbulence.
With a motor-yacht ‘you are building an apartment and a dynamic system simultaneously’, he explains. And if that is a proposition that suggests compromise, then Sheriff has the ambition and vision to turn truths that may sit uncomfortably together into a pleasingly integrated whole. He understands racing cars, but he also understands Belgravia, since he lives there. This means he can speak both to ferrety-eyed designers and to hedonistic oligarchs with equal authority.
Yet a Princess motor-yacht is a technically sophisticated package as much as it is an exercise in maritime interior design. As a reluctant sailor, I’m very pleased to learn that nowadays dynamic systems include a Seakeeper gyroscope that, spinning at up to 97,000rpm and exploiting Newton’s Third Law in a way Sir Isaac had not anticipated, is said to eliminate 95% of nauseating roll.
So far as the apartment aspect of a motoryacht is concerned, Princess mocks up full-size interiors in Plymouth’s Old Ropery, a scarily enormous Napoleonic-era building (where they used to hang French spies ‘under harsh laws’), long enough to allow the fabrication of the hemp ropes The Admiralty required to secure its battleships to docks. Long enough also to accommodate an enormous MDF model of the Princess X95. To an architect or an interior designer, this sight is as tempting as a blank sheet of handmade Japanese paper.
Although, historically, the morphic evolution of motor yachts is slow, Sheriff is restless to find a new visual language for Princess. He explains: ‘I wanted to be a car designer, but decided I was not quite good enough.’ However, this does not stop him
‘Sheriff’S Straightforward ingenuity iS rare in naval architecture’
busily sketching on every occasion and on any surface he can find. Drawing, I have to tell you, is not one of his great strengths, but Sheriff has an amiable, shuffling improvisatory genius that lets others realise his vision.
Lately, he has been attacking the traditional motor-yacht’s ‘inhospitable spaces’ on napkins in impromptu design sessions while travelling to international boat shows in Fort Lauderdale, Dubai, Singapore and Monte Carlo. This traditional general arrangement has the ‘helm station’, or cockpit, at ‘midships’. But this leaves a dead area forward, so the helm-station has been moved to the flybridge, allowing the ‘saloon’ to extend to the whole length of the craft. In this way effectively making a Princess 95 a Princess 115 and thus pleasing those anxious for more disco space.
I ask if he owns a Princess. ‘Do I look like a millionaire?’ he replies with an amiable shrug. ‘Yes, you do,’ I tell him. While investigating Antony Sheriff ’s net worth is beyond the scope of this article, I think it’s fair to guess that he is familiar with the life lived aboard his products. ‘That’s where you take your coffee,’ he says, pointing to an area his new general arrangement has liberated. Knowing the morals and manners of tastes of Cadogan Square is surely helpful when discussing the precise shade of beige you want the shagreen that covers the bar to be.
Sheriff’s straightforward ingenuity, a willingness to ask that most difficult thing, a simple question, is rare in the conservative world of naval architecture. Because his plan has altered a motor-yacht’s proportions, something agreed long ago, Sheriff called his old friends at Pininfarina who brought their own type of auto-industry skills to Shit Creek.
But while traditionalists may grumble, customers are happy. And there are ever more of them. Since 2008, Princess has been owned by the LVMH luxury conglomerate (where the ‘M’ stands for ‘Moët’) and, pre-Sheriff, it was making ugly losses and kept afloat by cash injections from a normally unsentimental, but in this case indulgent, Bernard Arnault. Now the business is profitable; only topographically does Princess remain up Shit Creek.
Beauty has always been an assumption in yacht design. In 1661 Samuel Pepys wrote that King Charles II’s new yacht ‘will be a very pretty thing’, thus good for the monarch’s business. When the Royal Yacht Britannia was being laid-down in the 1940s, an artist – a painter, not a naval architect – was consulted over the precise profile of the sheerline that, like a car’s character-line and window graphics, dominates the external perception of any vessel.
Meanwhile, so many of the old assumptions about motor-yacht design have been made redundant by new technology, not to mention new customers who are sometimes so alien to the good manners customary in The Royal Yacht Squadron. There are, for example, Chinese yacht customers who buy hulls alone for socialising dockside, never leaving harbour, in this way saving money on expensive engines and nav systems.
For those still willing to go to sea, those gyros stop you feeling sick. Meanwhile, CCTV and powerful bow-thrusters mean an 85-foot motor-yacht can be manoeuvred by two people alone, so you can sack your Armani-clad crew of 16 and do-it-yourself. Once, strakes, luffs and scuppers were dictated by hydrodynamic considerations alone. Not any more.
While in his pomp at Detroit, Harley Earl said it was the task of the car designer to see into the future. And the last thing Antony Sheriff says to me as he parks his Volvo XC90 is: ‘I want to know what the next Princess needs to look like.’ My guess is that Pininfarina will tell him.