By now, we all know that one of the fastest-growing trends in boat design in the past few years has been the expansion of usable space on board, particularly in cockpits, swim platforms, and the aft ends of recreational boats. The trend started in megayachts and now has worked its way down to 30- and 40-foot production cruising boats.
The idea is to create extra space, and to erase (or at least camouflage) the distinction between the interior and the exterior areas of the boat. We now have “beach clubs” where the transom opens up to a new indoor/outdoor cabin or lounging space; swim platforms that extend out, down and even up; and bulwarks that drop down from the sides of cockpits and even the hull sides of midship master staterooms to create new “terraces” for lounging and dining.
Now Nauta Design, the Milan firm that specializes in megayachts but that also has designed the Lagoon Seventy8 and the Lagoon Sixty7 luxury power catamarans, has taken these concepts to a new level. Nauta has just designed, and patented, “The Island,” an expandable aft-deck beach club with fold-out bulwark terraces and an uninterrupted walkway that embraces three sides of the hull aft.
To create the walkway, Nauta designed a connecting section between the side terraces that open out over the water at the beach club level and the fold-down bulwarks that extend the stern platform. The walkway lets guests move freely from one side of the yacht to the other, either from the beach club or the open aft deck.
Nauta has now registered this concept with a utility patent in Italy (generally protecting the way an article is used), and design patents in Turkey and the EU (generally protecting the way an article looks). Read more:
