Over the years, articles on advances in yacht design have invariably focused on hull form and rig, and very rarely on interiors – but it’s here that some of the most important changes have taken place, changes that affect not just the accommodation, but the entire vessel. The traditional yacht interior – at least up to around 30ft (9.1m), which was typical for cruising yachts of old – barely changed since it was standardised between the two wars by serial builders like Berthon, Hillyard and countless others.
Spirit Yachts, he has mostly held the hard-won wisdom of the past tightly in his hand. “That classic inter-war yacht interior,” he says, “was just practical at sea or at anchor or on a mooring.” What we are talking about here is as follows: galley to port, chart table to starboard then, moving forwards, a settee each side for sitting or (with a lee cloth) for sleeping, with a folding table between. Forward of that would be the fo’c’s’le, with typically a fold-down pipe cot on one or both sides, and a mess of sails, ropes, anchors and buckets on the sole. The heads might be a bucket and chuck-it arrangement between those two pipe cots with a hatch above for headroom while using it. (The man whose head appears above deck on a beautiful morning is not just admiring the view.) On the larger yachts, you would get a separate enclosed heads to port and a hanging locker to starboard, between the saloon and fo’c’s’le. The cutaway of the Albin Vega overleaf gives a rough idea. Larger still, and you might get a quarter berth or two. These are berths aft of the galley an/or chart table that extend all or part way under what would otherwise be the cockpit lockers. Siting the galley and (usually) heads to port, made life in those places more comfortable when heaving to in the usual fashion, on starboard tack. Narrow bunks were a necessity on vessels of limited beam, and they also meant that occupants could sleep wedged between settee back and lee cloth. Again, this suited the hull shape, as these earlier boats heeled more due to that narrowness in the beam, a narrowness that enabled them to sail well to windward.
