![]() Mick Jagger, Usher and Joss Stone are also said to have spent time in the studio – a claim no other superyacht is ever likely to make.īarnett took a simple approach to the interior decor. “Back then, no yacht was capable of non-stop circumnavigation, while cutting an album for U2,” he says. Included in the layout were out-of-the-box features such as a fully equipped medical centre, a storm cabin made to keep those who needed it comfortable in bad weather and a professional recording studio. “I did the opposite!” And the result was what Barnett describes as a “floating laboratory”, a timeless design perfectly suited to a creative genius. “Paul Allen’s team told me the safest route would be to follow the creative direction of the owner’s two previous Feadship designs,” the designer says. The owner’s team chose Barnett from a small pool of interior designers to embellish the complex GA of the largest and most advanced explorer yacht ever built at the time. ![]() Octopus’s interior, meanwhile, came from a young American designer who had recently relocated from London where he’d worked with Jon Bannenberg, to Seattle. We even tested it by driving a tender in and out.” “Our in-house model department then built a scale model of the garage to demonstrate how it could work. “After researching multiple alternatives, the first idea that Espen drew was the one that worked the best,” he adds. It also had to solve the matter of the explorer’s floodable garage, which had to be approved by class. “We ended up having to build her with a partner in Kiel,” Breman says. The proposal Lürssen created with Øino was successful, but the German shipyard soon had to resolve its first quandary – it didn’t have a shed available. “She was our 15th project enquiry in 1998, and so in my office, she was known as 9815.” ![]() Little did we know then that Octopus would be her name once completed and delivered.” Øino says. “Along with Paul’s love for diving, plus the fact that his previous yacht was Méduse, we thought Octopus was a perfect project name. “At Lürssen, we give everything a project name, and my daughter came up with Octopus,” says Breman. Instead, working with the rules that oversee subdivisions inside a ship’s hull – and deal with damage stability calculations – he created one very long and tall compartment on the yacht’s centreline with a floodable dock flanked by rows of smaller garages to store the entire toy inventory of what became known as Project Octopus. “Launching so many toys over the side of the boat wasn’t the optimum idea and would affect the stability a lot of heeling would occur,” the designer says. So Øino drew a methodical general arrangement that included a two-level 36-metre-long floodable garage opening at the stern. “What is remarkable is that the original sketches and ideas are so close to what it actually became,” Breman says.Īnother key part of the brief was for all toys and tenders, including a helicopter, a submarine and a floatplane, to be carried in a concealed way. What he went on to sketch in pencil and model for the presentation was a sturdy explorer with two interchangeable options for the bow and the wheelhouse. “I had a photo of Fennica from a few years earlier when I visited her while cruising with another client in the fjords,” says the designer. The brief called for an industrial-style yacht with the appearance and capability of the Finnish multipurpose icebreaker Fennica, built in 1993. “Michael was in our office as the fax came in and going through it, we just couldn’t believe the brief, we thought it was totally crazy.” ![]() “Put that into context, this is 1998!” Øino says with a laugh. Some time after, during a trip to the South of France, Breman received the go-ahead to submit a bid and arranged for a fax containing the brief to be sent to Øino’s office in Monaco. “So I contacted Paul Allen’s broker, Stuart Larsen, to ask some questions.” “I figured out that something was going on and we ought to be involved,” he says.
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