Italian yacht design according to Baglietto: letting the spirit of place sail

In a global market where the race for size and speed – go big, go fast– has often erased distinct identities, Baglietto stands out by positioning itself on the opposite side: a clarity of values whose history pre-dates even the unified Italian state. The first shipyard bearing the Baglietto name was founded in 1854 in Pietro Baglietto’s garden in Varazze, on the western Ligurian coast. It is an Italian story rooted in a coastline seemingly made for the kinds of innovations born where craft meets design: think of the legendary Chiavari chairs, the chiavarine, which inspired Gio Ponti’s Superleggera in the 1950s.

From its artisanal beginnings, Baglietto did not wait for the twentieth century to embrace experimentation and innovation: the yard’s craft won races and awards as early as the late 1800s. The pre-war years brought military production but above all the wooden pleasure yachts that made the brand iconic. After the Second World War, under another Pietro’s leadership, production accelerated and Baglietto made great leaps forward with models that entered the Italian sea imagination, like the Elba and the 16-metre Ischia, and later, in the 1980s, with the Al-Fahedi yacht.

Even as the company flowed forward, it continued to intertwine with the history of Italian design, not just industrial design. Thanks to that identity, Baglietto weathered crises and consolidated itself within broader industrial groups such as the Gavio Group, of which it has been a part since 2012. The shipyard is no longer in Varazze: its headquarters sit in the yachting capital along La Spezia’s waterfront, covering 35,000 sqm and equipped with a 1,200-ton travel lift, while inland in Carrara the company builds pleasure yachts and the blue-water fishing boats for cult American brand Bertram. The spirit of innovation remains unchanged, from the introduction of marine plywood in the 1950s, which opened a new era of much lighter, more modern Baglietto boats, to today’s integration of hydrogen fuel cells into a comprehensive system, combining on-board electrical production for both hotel loads and hybrid propulsion with on-shore hydrogen production and storage at the yard.

These innovations are always tied to spatial thinking: people are living aboard boats more and more, and Baglietto saw this decades ago by treating the aft deck as habitable space and popularizing the flybridge, today a cornerstone of yacht design. The connection is not only with the practices of living but with architectural project thinking: Al-Fahedi emerged from a collaboration with Studio Zuccon, and for thirty years Baglietto’s boat concepts have been signed by architect Francesco Paszkowski. Positioning itself in a market with almost mandatory high standards, Baglietto gives great value to the genius loci even though its objects, by definition, constantly change location. The genius that runs through its range is Italian: the layering of a century-plus heritage, the technical know-how of a benchmark industry, and above all an aesthetic sensibility; a synergy of details that creates an atmosphere hard to imitate.

It is the luminosity of the interiors on the Dom range; the articulation of outdoor spaces on the XO Line, a near-sequence of terraces on the sea. It’s the pursuit of tailor-made performance, as in the latest 48-metre developed with the owner in a team with Floating Life, Satura Studio and Zero13 to be ready for a world cruise at high latitudes: dominated by continuous sightlines – from the 360° glazing of the main salon to a lower deck that runs uninterrupted along the full length – and featuring solutions inspired by Italian know-how, including a tender launch system that operates directly from the sea. Above all, it is a constant dialogue between places: an Italian design signature that absorbs and reinterprets varied inspirations with each new project. The most recent example is the Vesta 56 superyacht concept developed with Meyer Davis: while its aesthetic reads like a “water jet” in motion, it places the utmost priority on being a home (recall that Vesta is the “goddess of dwelling”), evoking New York interiors with sculptural chiaroscuro while reinforcing a sense of intimacy and belonging, the very foundation of Italian notions of dwelling, whether a palazzo or a hut.

After all, the Italian house “is rich in the ways of size, not merely in the ways of preciousness”, Gio Ponti wrote in 1928 in the essay that inaugurated a century of Domus history. Its comfort lies “in the invitation that the Italian House offers to our spirit to recreate itself in restful visions of peace, which consists in the full sense of the beautiful Italian word, conforto (consolation).”