WHO IS TOBY ECUYER?

Toby Ecuyer is the epitome of a self-made man. His parents lived on a farm in the Peak District and didn’t have a car. When he left school at 16, with neither exam qualifications nor their blessing, he certainly didn’t seem to be heading for any kind of eminent career. But he did have a consciousness of modern design, not least of the latest cars, an ability at technical drawing and “a lovely letter” from Austin Rover’s design department, to which he’d sent some speculative car designs as an 11-year-old. That was his first sense, he says, that design could be a career.

He walked from home into nearby Derby seeking work by “knocking on 30 or 40 doors, any place with a drawing board visible through the window” until he was taken on by a small local architecture practice as a YTS recruit. The architects – under whose wing he soon rose from print boy to draughtsman

– were lecturers at the local poly and introduced him to the idea of further study. Eventually, with their support, he alighted on a foundation design course in Torquay, which led (after he’d won “a few competitions”) to architecture school in Plymouth, where he both loved the work and learned to sail to a professional standard. A desire for adventure led to a first career as a professional sailing boat skipper and a love for “the tiny village” aspect of boats, but in his twenties, with a few close shaves behind him, he decided a more formal career was needed. A chance sighting of a small ad in Yachting World prompted him to illustrate his CV on a very long sheet of paper (“I was never any good at writing”) and won him his first job as a yacht designer.

A prize-winning design and a chance meeting at the resulting Monaco ceremony led to a much bigger job and, over the next 20 years, to his building a reputation as one of the world’s greatest in the field. It was on this journey that he met Sir Jim Ratcliffe, and the Ineos phase began.