Behind some of the world’s most iconic products, including the Herman Miller Sayl Chair, Samsung Frame TV and the 2005 initiative One Laptop Per Child, Yves Béhar has been at the top of the global design profession since he launched his studio Fuseproject, in 1999. Now, the Swiss-born American designer tells BOAT about his first eco-cat concept, Solsea, designed in collaboration with Rossinavi.
Béhar has been announced as a keynote speaker for the Superyacht Design Festival, which will return to the alpine town of Kitzbühel, Austria, between 2-4 February 2025.
BUY TICKETS HEREBetween the design world and the yacht world, there exists a slight (yet significant) language barrier. That much was apparent on Tuesday in Miami, when Yves Béhar – the internationally-recognised maker of products and interiors and upcoming keynote speaker for the Superyacht Design Festival – was on stage at Design Miami, the annual fair for all things furniture-ish that runs concurrently with the city’s blowout art week.
Next to Béhar sat one of his newest clients: Federico Rossi, COO of Rossinavi, the family-owned Italian shipyard that’s been turning out award-winning luxury boats since 2007. The two were speaking as part of Design Miami’s talk series, discussing their still-speculative yet fast-progressing 43-metre electric catamaran concept, the Solsea, when a remark from Rossi prompted a puzzled expression from moderator and fair president Glenn Adamson.
"Beam," Béhar said, repeating the unfamiliar usage. "It means width."
For Béhar, assuming the role of yachtspeak translator is a development only as remarkable as the Solsea project itself. Born in Switzerland, and raised largely in Turkey, Béhar has been at the top of the global design profession since nearly the moment he launched his multidisciplinary practice, Fuseproject, in 1999.
With work like his 2005 One Laptop Per Child - portable computers that could be cheaply made and distributed in the developing world – and the 2011 Puma Clever Little Bag – a chic, ecologically sensitive packaging system for the popular footwear brand – Béhar has established a reputation for work that addresses major social issues with a combination of technical daring and visual flair.
Chatting over coffee on the shore of Biscayne Bay the day after he and Rossi’s Design Miami appearance, Béhar explained his approach. "Innovation, whether it’s in sustainability or technology, has to be felt, experienced, by users," he said.
Alongside figures like Philippe Starck and Patricia Urqilola, Béhar now occupies a rarified niche in the design world, and his star has shone nowhere brighter than at Design Miami, which awarded him its Design Innovator Prize in 2015. It was at the fair two years ago – following a book talk on the same stage he appeared on this week – that he happened to meet Rossi, a regular attendee at Design Miamis past.
"He gave me his book, and I said we should work together," recalled Rossi; in Béhar’s telling, he responded to Rossi’s offer with a simple question: "What is changing in your world?" The boatmaker explained that Rossinavi was trying to respond to the growing calls for increased energy efficiency in the industry. It was exactly what Béhar wanted to hear.
Already, the designer had been engaged in a years-long effort to develop electric vehicles, including an ongoing collaboration with startup car manufacturer Telo. The encounter with Rossi "felt like a meeting of the minds," he said, a sign that the yachting sector, like the automotive field before it, was "ready to invite people like me, who are innovation generalists, to apply new technologies in new ways."
Having spent much of his youth boating and fishing around the Sea of Marmara near his parents’ home in Istanbul, Béhar is no stranger to the water – yet his decision to create a full-scale motor yacht was still a bold move, a mark of his growth as a designer. "I don’t think I would have had the confidence or experience to design a boat twenty years ago," he said.
The Solsea concept began with a couple of givens. For starters, it had to be a catamaran: "The efficiency is simply much greater than a monohull," Rossi notes, the cat’s twin canoe-like volumes having a shallower draft that makes for decreased friction; the central tunnel between the hulls would also provide added room for Solsea’s batteries, which are intended to allow the ship to run on electricity alone for 80 per cent of a complete transatlantic voyage.
At the same time, the cat format would give the boat plenty of square footage within a still-economical 43-metre-long frame, ensuring comfortable, spacious interiors as well as added surface area for the solar panels that cover nearly every exterior surface, including a raiseable foredeck pool cover.
There were logistic considerations as well. "The access to different areas has to be very carefully considered," said Béhar, "how the staff moves about the boat, how the captain goes to the control room." While attending to these niggling, still-unfamiliar details, the designer remained determined to create a boat that would also speak a compelling and novel aesthetic language.
One that could convey to owners and guests not only a sense of luxury, but an organic connection to the maritime environment: sleek, curvaceous furniture and wall treatments, much of them made from recycled materials; cork-lined decks, as elegant as the typical teak but far more sustainable; a retractable beach-club door, providing full access to the water without the often junky aft-side look of so many cats – all of it was intended to create a harmonious ambience that chimed with Solsea’s eco-ambitions. As Béhar puts it, "I want people to see and feel the change that they’re subscribing to."
It will be a while before anyone will be able to feel that change in person. At Design Miami, he and Rossi said that while a prototype infrastructure was already undergoing testing, the final realisation of Béhar’s Solsea vision would not be ready until at least 2027.
Undaunted by the wait ("I once designed a cereal box for Target that took five years," he told the panel audience) Béhar appears content to bide his time, spending it learning the ropes of an industry that is itself only beginning – tentatively at least – to make more room for established global architects and designers of Béhar’s calibre.
For all parties, the process entails a learning curve. Struggling, over coffee, to describe one key section of his Solsea scheme, the designer was saved by his client, who offered the proper term of art. "The pilot house," Rossi said.