The wacky requests from Gulf Craft’s superyacht buyers

Installing 24 carat gold taps or a helicopter pad has become a run-of-the-mill task for the UAE's Gulf Craft.

Superyachts are readied for delivery to their respective wealthy owners. Victor Besa for The National

Gulf Craft’s engineers and designers often have to rack their brains to execute wacky requests, such as an all-white yacht with mother of pearl inlay, white silk carpets and white wood, or a “disappearing” dining table.

Installing 24-carat gold taps or a helicopter pad has become a run-of-the-mill task for Gulf Craft.

“The difficulty of landing a helicopter on a moving object in the middle of the sea is bizarre enough for me, but we don’t get surprised anymore,” says chief executive Erwin Bamps.

Mr Bamps explains how one owner wanted a dining table without a permanent structure filling the inside of a deck. “We had to come up with an original solution that actually elevates the whole dining table into the ceiling, recessed, then when he wants it again, it comes down and sets itself back into a dining table.”

Some requests are more personal. One client wanted to recreate the feel and smell of a cigar lounge he visited in a Swiss hotel while on holiday. So Gulf Craft sent its designers to that hotel to see the lounge and emulate that atmosphere on the boat.

The smoking room concept seems to be popular and was one of the highlights of the Majesty 155. On the superyacht, the owner didn’t want smoke to penetrate other rooms, so Gulf Craft had to create a special air-conditioning system, and exhaust system to meet the client’s request.

“He wanted a room that looked very different from the rest of the interior and we provided him with a design that actually has cigar leaves in the ceiling coated with real acrylic so that you can see through it,” said Mr Bamps.

The cigar leaves were Maduro, dark brown and imported straight from Honduras.

The Majesty 155 has the usually accoutrements of a luxurious lifestyle: an elevator, two extendable balconies (one in the owner’s stateroom and another in the main saloon); a waterfall that cascades from the sun deck to the upper deck’s Jacuzzi, and a traditional hand-crafted mosaic water fountain on the sun deck.

“The issue is on a boat you want all the comfort you are used to in a home or a villa, but the problem is that you are working with a very compact space utilisation,” said Mr Bamps. “You want everything on board, yet you don’t want weight. That is always a challenge.”​

But not all requests are approved – the Star Trek Enterprise replica failed to make it to warp drive and an entirely green yacht never made any boat owners sick with envy.

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