Beautify the boat

The road to refurbishment is paved with good decisions – what to keep, what to spend and where to start. Having decided, action them in the right order.

There are two main reasons why owners refurbish a boat: one, for resale; two, for their own enjoyment. They are likely to spend significantly less on the resale option than when refurbishing a boat they plan to keep.

The owner of the Fairline Squadron 64 featured in these pages imported it to New Zealand from Florida, USA when it was about 10 years old. After cruising it here for eight years, he was ready to sell but first, the boat’s interior needed a cosmetic overhaul. He engaged the services of interior designer Dianne Carian of bydizine. The original budget was around $25,000.

Dianne says the first step was to break the job into superficial elements and foundational elements. Superficial elements are those which are fairly easy to change without physically dismantling anything structural on the boat – for example, cushions, squabs, bed linen and loose carpets are superficial as they can easily be carried off the boat.

Foundational elements are those which involve mechanical

intervention – for example fixed floor coverings, ceiling or wall panels. Straight away that’s a bigger commitment.

The major foundational elements up for replacement were the navy blue carpet, and the hull and ceiling linings. The linings were vinyl-backed with foam but a decade in the hot Florida climate had caused the foam inside to disintegrate. Previous owners had replaced some of the vinyl panels with macrosuede, new vinyl or even carpet. In some places the original vinyl was still in

place but had pulled away from the hull or ceiling and sagged, especially on damp days. The overall effect was, in Dianne’s words, a mish-mash.

Do-ups for resale are usually about getting maximum value for little money, but early on it became apparent that the owner’s original budget of $25,000 hadn’t allowed for total replacement of the hull linings in the cabins, main saloon and flybridge.

“Once you start replacing some parts with new then everything else looks really shabby so in the end the owner decided we would take out things like carpets, ceiling panels and carpets on walls,” Dianne says. “So whatever could be dismantled easily, such as ceiling panels, were taken away to the upholsterer. In the cabins, it was all done in situ.”

The owner wanted to retain existing furnishings wherever possible. The white leather upholstery in the saloon was in good condition and only needed a good clean, so Dianne selected carpet that worked with that and the existing timber cabinetry.

“That’s one good thing about leather,” she says. “You can often give it a good clean and have it looking almost as good as new, whereas you can’t do that so easily with fabric.

“If people are refurbishing their boat for their own use, it’s worth considering leather upholstery. It’s more expensive but it has good appearance retention and durability.”

Another request was that the refurbishment would reflect the décor of the latest model Fairline Squadron so it would like part of the family beside its younger sisters. The existing, navy blue carpet had been in the boat since new but modern Fairline Squadron boats have white carpets with a mid-tone upholstery.

Since they were retaining the white upholstery, Dianne recommended a neutral, mid-tone carpet to offset the white.

“It was particularly challenging to get the right colour of carpet,” she says: “not too similar to the woodwork colour but with subtle, distinctive contrasts.”

Next came the choice of fibre for the carpet. Dianne was keen

Designing interior decor for new boats