Interior Departures
Silver Wind’s general arrangement and interior design represent as much a departure as her systems architecture. The lower deck layout is conventional insofar as it houses the galley, crew quarters, two en suite guest cabins and a full-beam VIP suite. The captain’s cabin, however, is located outside the crew area and is effectively a guest cabin. Another cabin space has been sacrificed in favor of a massage room and gym with a side-opening balcony at water level, although this can easily be converted back into an en suite stateroom.
Instead of occupying its customary position amidships, the circular dining table on the main deck is between the open aft deck and the main salon. This provides guests with the choice of dining in the semi-open air with the sliding glass doors open when at anchor, or closed for added privacy when moored stern-to. Around half of the volume on the main deck is taken up by the owner’s suite, which offers a further surprise. Arranged on two levels, it has direct access to the gym via a private staircase.
Valentina Zannier, Nuvolari-Lenard’s principal interior designer, has a fine eye for detail. In fact, although the ISA 140 was ostensibly devised for series production, Silver Wind has a highly customized interior. The primary veneers include black walnut, high-gloss Macassar ebony and rosewood, all artfully combined with stainless steel and leather, fabrics by Hermès and Armani, bespoke carpets by Tai Ping and custom lighting by Charles Paris.
The bathrooms are especially luxurious with handcrafted mosaics of ivory and iris onyx in the owner’s suite, and azul macauba, rosa Portugal and cipollino Greco marble in the guest staterooms, which have been matched to the color scheme of the fabrics.
Zannier excels at seamlessly combining these key materials with multiple decorative elements, such as Lalique accents, mother-of-pearl inlays, artglass and metal straw marquetry, without ending up with a fussy or embellished design. Each material complements its neighbor and the general ambience is sophisticated, yet relaxed. —J.R.
mode, the system’s main advantage is increased flexibility and redundancy. Silver Wind moved ahead of the competition, however, with her variable-speed generators, which are still a rarity on yachts.
The drawback with conventional generators is that they are designed to operate at constant speed or rpm to meet peak loads, regardless of whether they are running power-hungry a/c systems or a single light bulb. Variable-speed generators, on the other hand, do exactly as the name suggests: Their speed can be varied to optimize output for actual power demands. When at anchor, for example, they can run at reduced speed, resulting in less noise, emissions, fuel consumption and maintenance.
The reason fixed-speed generators have not gone the way of the dinosaur is that constant speed means constant frequency, so they can be hooked up directly to the main switchboard. By the same token, variable speed means variable frequency, which requires a power management system to convert output into a frequency the onboard consumers can use. This involves added expense and requires more technical space to accommodate the water-cooled frequency converters, but ISA project manager Gianluca Gabellini insists the pros outweigh the cons.
“The biggest challenge from our point of view was working with Siemens to integrate the electrical systems,” he says. “But in electric mode during sea trials, the difference was amazing. She felt more like a sailing boat than a motoryacht. You could stand on the open aft deck without realizing there was an engine room underneath your feet.”
Another technological innovation is in the wheelhouse, which has one of the most advanced integrated bridge systems devised for a yacht. A collaborative project among bridge design consultants Team Italia, IT specialists Transas (which in 1996 installed an electronic chart system on the Russian MIR space station) and monitoring experts Onyx Marine Automation, the I-Bridge is a 3-D augmented-reality interface that brings diverse systems into a single bridge environment.
Derived from aerospace technology, augmented reality supplements elements of the real-world environment with computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. In situations of poor visibility, at night or in congested or shallow water, the I-Bridge augments the picture by integrating navigation data and input from the forward-looking sonar with live video from a thermal imaging camera.
“I love the flexibility of the bridge system on Silver Wind,” says Capt. Istvan Virag. “It simplifies the display of critical information so that I can process situations incredibly quickly without having to look at multiple screens and assemble a picture in my own head.”
Sound insulation on large yachts, especially in the cabins, has reached a level whereby the loudest noise at anchor might be the gentle whoosh of the a/c system. For those with particularly sensitive ears this can be irritating, so the cabins aboard Silver Wind feature an innovative technology known as Active Noise Canceling. Based on the same principle as noise-canceling headphones and developed by Videoworks, a leader in audiovisual and automation systems, it first appeared on CRN’s Darlings Danama in 2011, but has since evolved.
Miniature microphones fitted in the guest cabin headboards (and in the ceiling above the bed in the owner’s cabin) capture ambient noise and convert it into a digital signal. This is then processed to create a counter signal that is amplified and relayed to a woofer. These disruptive sound waves effectively cancel out the incoming noise. The system operates within a range of 20 to 200Hz, which covers the low-frequency sound produced by engines, generators and a/c fan coils. When the system is activated, ambient noise can be reduced by up to 10 decibels within a 6-foot radius of the microphones.
The owners of Silver Wind already have a 154-foot (47.5-meter) full-displacement ISA. Their experience with this conventionally powered yacht may have been the incentive to create Silver Wind, which is ideal for high-speed transfers over the relatively short distances between destinations in the Med or for whisper-quiet cruising at a more stately pace using her electric motors. The beauty is, the choice is theirs.