On board the world's largest sailing catamaran, ArtExplorer

“I don’t see myself as a yacht owner, more of a museum director,” says Jousset when we speak via Zoom. Softly spoken with a laser-like focus, the French tech entrepreneur and philanthropist founded outsourcing giant Webhelp in 2000 – which started out as a pre-Google search engine and expanded to employ more than 120,000 people around the world. Art is his great love, he tells me. At 35, a box-fresh multimillionaire, he forwent the Ferrari and donated €1 million to the Louvre.

He is also a self-confessed adrenaline junkie who races catamarans for fun. The idea for ArtExplorer came when he was climbing Mount Everest in 2019. “One always says the man who comes down is different from the man who climbs up. And literally, this is where I had an awakening moment,” he recalls.

Chartering a sailing yacht cemented his plan. “I started to think about how much I loved culture and what I could contribute. I could add another museum, but it’s nothing new. Private foundations have been done, but I thought no one has thought of the sea, of using a boat as a platform.”

Art is a force for good, and he passionately believes in its power to unite society and increase social mobility. “I’ve seen so many times people blocked in their career because of their social skills, because they have the wrong accent or because they don’t have the cultural references.”

His plan was to build a huge attention-grabbing sailing catamaran which would draw the crowds and bring art to the people – “and if people don’t come to us, we will come to them”. In fact, ArtExplorer is just the pinnacle of a larger foundation offering pop-up arts and cultural programmes.

The man who listened to Jousset’s back-of-a-napkin idea almost four years ago and ran with it was Fraser’s technical manager Laurent Bredy, who acted as owner representative.

There was no precedent for a floating museum-cum-superyacht – “It’s what I call a UFO, an Unusual Floating Object!” Bredy jokes – so two competitions were held: one to find a designer, the other a shipyard. The job eventually fell to The Italian Sea Group’s Perini Navi, experts in sailing yachts, competitively priced and thrilled at taking on the challenge.

Their brief, says Perini Navi’s sales director Andrea Bigagli, was to build “something extraordinary… the best and biggest sailing catamaran in the world; a yacht which combines the French soul of its owner and designers, with Italian craftsmanship and Perini Navi know-how in the large sailhandling system”.

They also needed to build it in a near-impossible time frame of just over two years. There were few other shipyards that had the facilities and the expertise to take on such a project, but even then it was the first time Perini Navi had built a sailing catamaran, and Bigagli stresses it was very much a team effort, a tight synergy between shipyard, design team and the Fraser team.

“When you normally press the button to build the boat, you don’t change anything,” says Bredy, “but the complexity and challenges obliged us to adapt the project right up to the end.”

It was also a project naval architects Axel de Beaufort and Guillaume Verdier couldn’t refuse. The pair run their own studios and regularly join forces on projects such as designing racing yachts for the America’s Cup, while de Beaufort also has a sideline as creative director for Hermès’ Atelier Horizons, designing a range of custom projects from car interiors to private jets.

The prospect of being given full reign over all aspects of ArtExplorer’s design – from the hull to the interiors, right down to the sofas, fabrics and doorknobs, appealed to de Beaufort. “We like to go very deep on a subject… and I’d rather have the full project than do part of it.”

Large cruising catamarans are, with their large decks and wide platforms, heavy watercraft. Jousset wanted volume, but also for the boat to really move when cruising. (Under sail, ArtExplorer can easily exceed 12 knots with approximately 15 knots of true wind speed.)

So, de Beaufort and Verdier employed all their own high-precision aero-hydro tools, working with Lateral Naval Architects in the UK for the initial conception before starting to work with Perini to make the aluminium structure as efficient as possible.

The result was a groundbreaking design with a thin hull shape and long keel. “There’s a big step above the waterline that enlarges the hull, but underneath the hull is very thin and very deep to optimise hydrodynamic resistance,” says de Beaufort.

De Beaufort also had to fulfil Jousset’s request for six cabins to maximise charter accommodation and squeeze everything in around the huge saloon-cum-exhibition space.

It was a complex jigsaw of a general arrangement and he had to make some compromises, most notably, dialling down cabin size: “I told [Jousset] we can make them very comfortable and cool but they don’t need to be big. You’re there to enjoy the boat itself in its totality.” 

Besides weight and volume, there were other things to juggle: namely, that the boat had to be, in effect, designed twice over – as a museum and a charter boat. “The two are not compatible with each other,” says Bredy. “On a basic level, a large part of the high-end equipment and museum machinery needed to be hidden when the boat is in charter mode and the luxury interiors have to remain highly modular so they could be easily dismantlable by the crew and stored away.”

One of the biggest challenges was the exhibition tunnel, which consists of 16-metre-long LED screens that wrap around the walls. Another design first, they were engineered by Akumendo and ArScénique so they could be dismantled in panels, but the process was not without hiccups.

“As we quickly discovered, when you put them on a wall inside a boat, you create a sauna,” laughs Bredy. The solution was to integrate some extra air conditioning inside the mast column at the centre of the room. De Beaufort gave it curves so it didn’t look ugly.

When ArtExplorer switches into charter mode, the yacht’s interiors are unrecognisable. An artful smattering of varnished mahogany – a staple ingredient in classic sailing boats – contrasts with contemporary furniture and fittings.

The concrete-look flooring is modern yet, mindful of the 2,000 people trekking through the yacht, extremely hard-wearing. Inspired by the concrete floors of the Fondation Pinault in Venice, de Beaufort tracked down an alternative that wouldn’t crack with movement and found the answer in a resin floor used in supertankers: warmer, more tactile underfoot and, crucially, lighter.

It’s pared down, cool and far from the lavish interiors of many luxury charters, but de Beaufort was adamant it would work. Jousset was initially sceptical.

“He told me ‘we’re not doing a kind of monastic church here!’ But I really wanted to be very precise in what we do, and not try to add and add stuff. Everything in the boat is really oriented towards natural material and craftsmanship… because the boat is beautiful, and this beauty needs to be expressed in simple things. In the end he trusted me.” 

Outside, huge swathes of wrap-round bronzetinted glass continue the futuristic theme, a concept realised with the help of Eckersley O’Callaghan, a London glass specialist that has previously worked with Apple and NASA.

These were another design innovation, requiring months of meticulous pre-engineering. Boats naturally twist and move on water, De Beaufort explains. “So, the torsions can be huge when the boat is moving, you can have 50 centimetres of deflection or even more.”

For both Bredy, Bigagli and de Beaufort, the sleepless nights have all been worth it and they can finally turn their attention to other projects. For Jousset, however, his work is just beginning. ArtExplorer conducted her maiden exhibition in Malta in March, followed by Venice, April 17 to 22. Judging by the crowds she is attracting, his plan seems to be on track. 

And if someone copies his idea and builds a bigger boat? Jousset isn’t fazed. “When you do charity or philanthropy it’s always great to be in the spotlight. But if your true ambition is really to make an impact, then you’d be happy for people to join the cause,” he says. “I’d be very happy because ArtExplorer will forever be the first boat museum. I definitely don’t want it to be the last.”

First published in the June 2024 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.