01 Nov Feadship: The Full Story of the Dutch Superyacht Builder

Feadship: The Full Story of the Dutch Superyacht Builder

Feadship is a Dutch superyacht builder formed in 1949, when Dutch family shipyards joined forces as an export association, and as of December 2025 it ranked fourth among the world’s yacht builders by total length on order, according to BOAT International. This feature tells the whole story, from riverside boatyards to a 118.8-metre yacht with hydrogen fuel cells, using only dated, attributed sources, as of November 1, 2026.

Facts come from Feadship’s own history, press and careers pages, BOAT International’s 2026 Global Order Book, award results reported by BOAT International, YachtBuyer and CharterWorld, and company records published by investors. Figures are as reported on the dates shown and may change.

A Name Built on One Idea

Every Feadship starts with a blank sheet. The company describes its approach in one line: “If it can be imagined, it can be built” (Feadship, New Build page, undated). Feadship builds fully custom yachts in the Netherlands, each one designed and engineered for a single owner.

That idea has held for more than seven decades. Feadship says it was formed in 1949 in a café in Amsterdam, with roots that go back to 1849 (Feadship, About page, undated). The rest of this story is how a group of family boatyards turned that idea into a business, an art form and, by BOAT International’s count, one of the four largest order books by total length.

What It Takes to Build a Superyacht

A custom superyacht is closer to a small town than a large boat. Feadship’s own podcast series says a typical superyacht has “over a million components” and that a Feadship takes “three or four years” to build (Feadship Uncovered, episodes released July to August 2023). Its New Build page puts the same span as “three to four years from first pencil stroke to quayside delivery.”

The work falls into three stages, according to Feadship’s New Build page (undated):

• Imagine. The owner’s ideas set the brief. Designers sketch layouts, profiles and the way the owner wants to live on board.
• Design and engineering. Naval architects turn the concept into a hull that floats, moves efficiently and meets class and flag rules. At Feadship this is the job of De Voogt Naval Architects, whose Hoofddorp office employs about 175 people, according to Feadship’s careers site (undated).
• Build. Craftspeople weld the steel hull, build the aluminium superstructure, fit engines and systems, then add joinery, stone and paint.

Feadship stresses the parts owners rarely see. It calls the quality beneath floors and behind walls its “hidden gold” (Feadship, New Build page, undated). SuperYachts.com reports that some Feadship engine rooms are finished so well that owners have chosen to display them behind glass (SuperYachts.com, undated).

Each owner works with a single point of contact through the whole build, described by Feadship as a “single trusted guide” (Feadship, New Build page, undated).

Origins: Family Yards on the Dutch Waterways

Feadship’s own timeline begins long before the brand. It traces boatbuilding in the Van Lent family line to Lisse in 1849, and a yard on Kaag Island to 1877 (Feadship, History page, undated). The key founding names, according to that page, are:

• 1906: Han de Vries founds the first De Vries shipyard in Aalsmeer, at first building wooden workboats. Leisure yachts follow from 1910.
• 1913: Henri Willem de Voogt, a naval architect, opens a yacht yard on the Spaarne river in Haarlem.
• 1917: Cees van Lent and his brother-in-law Hein Akerboom set up Jachtwerf De Kaag.
• 1923: Han de Vries’s sons, Henk and Johan, found the De Vlijt shipyard.
• 1927: De Vries and Van Lent begin working together, starting with a 13.60-metre sailing yacht.

Before the war, De Voogt was already designing for royalty. Feadship’s timeline lists a 31-metre yacht designed in 1937 as a wedding gift for Princess Juliana and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, and a 54.30-metre yacht designed in 1936 for the Shah of Persia (Feadship, History page, undated).

The 1949 alliance

After the Second World War, Dutch yards needed export customers. In 1949, according to Feadship’s History page, De Vries and Van Lent joined four other Dutch shipyards to form the First Export Association of Dutch Shipbuilders, which gives the brand its name. The founding meeting took place at café De Roode Leeuw in Amsterdam. Henri W. de Voogt joined soon after and set one design approach for the first Feadships. (Some secondary accounts credit De Voogt as the founder; we follow the company’s own timeline.)

The New York debut

In 1951 the group showed three yachts at the New York Motor Boat Show, according to Feadship’s History page. Feadship’s timeline then dates a later triumph to 1953, when the 16.76-metre Capri was named “Queen of the Exposition,” sold during the show and helped bring in several American orders. Feadship’s careers site adds that the yards stopped building wooden yachts in the mid-1950s and moved to steel (Feadship careers, History page, undated).

How It Grew, Decade by Decade

The alliance narrowed over time to two shipbuilders and one design house. Feadship’s History page (undated) marks these milestones:

Year	Milestone (per Feadship’s History page)
1951	New York Motor Boat Show debut
1956	First of a series of yachts named The Highlander (29.80 m) for one American owner, who came back repeatedly
1960	Camargo IV (35.25 m), the largest Feadship of its time, with air conditioning and stabilising fins
1962	New build hall opens on Kaag Island
1975	Kaag facilities expand for projects over 60 m
1984	Members work together worldwide under one Feadship identity
1986	Digital design introduced at De Voogt; the fifth The Highlander (46.00 m) delivered
1990	Climate-controlled covered dry dock opens in Aalsmeer
2001	Van Lent receives the Royal designation, becoming Royal Van Lent Shipyard
2005	De Vries opens a second yard in Makkum
2006	De Vries receives the Koninklijke (Royal) designation
2015	Savannah (83.50 m), called the “world’s first hybrid motoryacht,” and Symphony (101.50 m), the first Feadship over 100 m
2019	Amsterdam facility opens, inaugurated by Queen Máxima; De Voogt introduces the YETI environmental index
2025	Breakthrough (118.80 m), described by Feadship as the world’s first hydrogen fuel cell superyacht

The growth in size is striking. Feadship’s careers site says the average yacht was about 30 metres in the 1970s and about 50 metres by the 1990s (Feadship careers, History page, undated). BOAT International’s 2026 Global Order Book puts the average Feadship on order at 77.2 metres (BOAT International, December 2025).

Over the full span, Feadship’s own podcast page says 460 Feadships have been built (Feadship Uncovered, 2023). SuperYachts.com, in an undated profile, says more than 500 Feadships are in operation worldwide. The two figures measure different things and come from different dates, so treat both as approximate.

The Art: Design Partners and Signature Traits

Feadship’s naval architecture is done in-house by De Voogt, but owners bring in outside designers for exteriors and interiors. Recent award results show the range of partners:

• Breakthrough (118.80 m, 2025): exterior and interior by RWD, naval architecture by Feadship De Voogt Naval Architects (YachtBuyer, May 5, 2026).
• Pi (100 m, 2025): exterior design by Jarkko Jämsén of Aivan (Feadship, February 2, 2026). YachtBuyer credits the interior to Liaigre (May 5, 2026).
• Valor (79.50 m, 2025): exterior by Studio De Voogt, interiors by Bannenberg and Rowell Design (YachtBuyer, May 5, 2026).
• Savannah (83.50 m, 2015): created in a partnership between Feadship and CGDesign (Feadship, November 15, 2016).

The Bannenberg name runs deep in Feadship history. The company’s timeline credits a Bannenberg interior on the fifth The Highlander in 1986 (Feadship, History page, undated), and Bannenberg and Rowell Design did Valor’s interiors almost four decades later.

Two traits come up again and again in the sources. The first is finish quality where no guest looks, the “hidden gold” Feadship describes. The second is engineering ambition: a hybrid drive in 2015, which Feadship said offered “fuel savings of up to 30%” (Feadship, November 15, 2016), and hydrogen fuel cells in 2025. YachtBuyer reports that Breakthrough stores about four tons of liquid hydrogen feeding 16 fuel-cell modules that run the hotel load, with water as the only by-product (YachtBuyer, May 5, 2026).

The Business Behind the Brand

Who owns Feadship

Feadship is a partnership of Royal Van Lent Shipyard, Koninklijke De Vries Scheepsbouw and De Voogt Naval Architects, according to Feadship’s careers site (undated).

• De Vries: fully family-owned and holds 50% of Feadship, according to Feadship (April 24, 2025). Henk de Vries stepped down as Feadship Director and De Vries CEO on May 1, 2025. As of April 2026, Roderick de Vries is CEO and Bas Nederpelt is Chief Commercial Officer and a Feadship Director (Maritime Technology Netherlands, April 10, 2026).
• Royal Van Lent: part of LVMH, according to Feadship’s careers site (undated). Investment firm Egeria says it sold the shipyard to LVMH in September 2008 (Egeria, page modified June 25, 2024).
• De Voogt Naval Architects: the design, engineering and research office in Hoofddorp, near Amsterdam (Feadship careers, undated).

Yards and people

Feadship lists four Dutch build locations on its contact page: Aalsmeer, Makkum, Kaag and Amsterdam (Feadship, Contact page, undated). Its History page places Aalsmeer and Makkum with De Vries, and its careers site places Kaag and Amsterdam with Royal Van Lent. Royal Van Lent says its two yards have three dock halls and two slipways, complete three to four superyachts a year, and build yachts of 70 to 160 metres, with up to about 850 people at peak (Feadship careers, Royal Van Lent page, undated).

Workforce figures vary by source and scope. Feadship’s careers site says over 1,800 craftsmen work across the partnership’s yards and specialist companies (undated). Feadship said in April 2025 that De Vries alone has over 1,200 employees across seven operating companies. SuperYachts.com reports more than 2,500 specialists (undated). We show all three because they count different groups.

The order book

BOAT International’s 2026 Global Order Book, published in December 2025 and covering contracts signed before September 1, 2025, ranks Feadship fourth among builders by total length on order. It lists 18 Feadship projects totalling 1,390 metres, an average of 77.2 metres each (BOAT International, December 2025). Feadship was third in the 2025 edition with 1,525 metres. The two larger builders by length, Azimut-Benetti and Sanlorenzo, build many more yachts at a much smaller average size, and Lürssen moved into third place at 1,417 metres, according to the same report.

Awards and Recognition

Feadship yachts have won BOAT International’s World Superyacht Awards top prize, Motor Yacht of the Year, several times. Dated results from the sources below include:

Year	Award	Yacht	Source
2016	World Superyacht Awards, Motor Yacht of the Year; ShowBoats Design Awards for exterior, interior and holistic design; ISS award in Fort Lauderdale	Savannah (83.50 m)	Feadship, November 15, 2016; YachtBuyer awards list
2018	World Superyacht Awards, Motor Yacht of the Year, plus three category wins in total for Feadship	Faith (96.55 m)	Feadship, May 22, 2018
2020	World Superyacht Awards, Motor Yacht of the Year; three category wins for Feadship	Pi (77.30 m)	Feadship, November 16, 2020
2025	World Superyacht Awards category win, 500GT to 1,499GT	B (59.50 m)	Feadship, ceremony May 3, 2025
2026	BOAT Design and Innovation Awards: best interior, best naval architecture, Eco and Innovation Award	Breakthrough (118.80 m)	Feadship, February 2, 2026
2026	World Superyacht Awards, Motor Yacht of the Year plus a category win	Breakthrough (118.80 m)	YachtBuyer, May 5, 2026; CharterWorld, May 4, 2026
2026	World Superyacht Awards category win, 1,500GT to 2,499GT	Valor (79.50 m)	YachtBuyer, May 5, 2026

The judges’ own words give a sense of the standard. In 2020 they called the 77.30-metre Pi “a yacht that borders on perfection,” and in 2025 they described B as “extremely well executed” (Feadship press pages, November 16, 2020 and May 2025). Note that the 2020 winner and the 100-metre Pi delivered in 2025 are two different yachts that share a name.

Feadship and South Florida

The American market has mattered to Feadship since the 1951 New York show. In a 2017 release, Feadship’s Farouk Nefzi said the United States has been “a key market for Feadship for the past seven decades” (Feadship, February 17, 2017).

• Fort Lauderdale office: Feadship America Inc. is based at the Bahia Mar Yachting Center on Seabreeze Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, according to Feadship’s contact page (undated).
• Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show: Feadship’s events page for the show, written for an earlier edition, invites visitors to arrange a meeting with one of its sales managers there (Feadship, events page, undated). Ahead of the 2016 show, it announced that the 83.50-metre Savannah would be on display, with boarding for pre-registered visitors only (Feadship, October 24, 2016).
• Awards in Florida: Savannah won the International Superyacht Society’s Best Power 65m+ award at the ISS gala in Fort Lauderdale (Feadship, November 15, 2016).

For refits and service, Feadship lists a separate Refit and Services division, listed at the same Hoofddorp address as Feadship Holland in the Netherlands (Feadship, Contact page, undated). We found no source for a Feadship-owned refit yard in Florida.

What Buying a Feadship Involves

There are two paths: commission a new yacht, or buy an existing one through a broker. Feadship also runs a resale service; its press room lists resale announcements in August and September 2026 (Feadship, Press page, checked November 1, 2026).

For a new build, the sources point to a few clear facts:

• Time: about three to four years from first design to delivery (Feadship, New Build page, undated).
• Size: the 18 Feadships on order average 77.2 metres (BOAT International, December 2025). Royal Van Lent builds yachts of 70 to 160 metres (Feadship careers, undated).
• Capacity: Royal Van Lent completes three to four yachts a year across its two yards (Feadship careers, undated), so build slots are limited.
• Process: one point of contact guides the owner from concept to delivery (Feadship, New Build page, undated).

Feadship does not publish prices, and we do not quote any here.

Questions to ask before you commission or buy

1. When is the earliest build slot, and what delivery window does the yard put in writing?
2. Which outside designers will we use for the exterior and interior, and how are their fees handled?
3. For a used Feadship, what refit and survey history is on file, and where was the work done?
4. Which flag and class will the yacht carry, and does that suit where we plan to cruise and charter?
5. Who will be our owner’s representative and captain during the build?

The Bottom Line

Feadship grew from Dutch family yards, the oldest traced to 1849 on the company’s own timeline, into a 1949 export alliance and then a partnership of two royal-designated shipbuilders and one design house. As of BOAT International’s 2026 Global Order Book, it had 18 yachts on order averaging 77.2 metres, fourth among builders by total length. Its yachts have won the World Superyacht Awards’ Motor Yacht of the Year in years including 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2026, the latest for the 118.8-metre, hydrogen-equipped Breakthrough. A new build typically takes three to four years, and Feadship’s Americas office sits in Fort Lauderdale.

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Sources (26) · all checked November 1, 2026

• Feadship, History timeline (undated): source
• Feadship, About Feadship (undated): source
• Feadship, New Build page (undated): source
• Feadship, Feadship Uncovered podcast page (episodes July to August 2023): source
• Feadship Careers, About the Feadship family (undated): source
• Feadship Careers, Royal Van Lent Shipyard (undated): source
• Feadship Careers, Feadship history (undated): source
• Feadship, Henk de Vries retires from executive role (April 24, 2025): source
• Maritime Technology Netherlands, leadership transition at Koninklijke De Vries Scheepsbouw (April 10, 2026): source
• Egeria, Royal Van Lent former investment (page modified June 25, 2024): source
• SuperYacht Times, LVMH to acquire Royal Van Lent (undated, 2008 news): source
• BOAT International, 2026 Global Order Book report (December 2025): source
• BOAT International, 2026 Global Order Book Live announcement (November 25, 2025): source
• Feadship, Savannah completes clean sweep of industry awards (November 15, 2016): source
• Feadship, Four Neptune trophies at the World Superyacht Awards (May 22, 2018): source
• Feadship, Clean sweep at the World Superyacht Awards (November 16, 2020): source
• Feadship, Double honours at the 2025 World Superyacht Awards (May 5, 2025; ceremony May 3, 2025): source
• Feadship, BOAT Design and Innovation Awards 2026 (February 2, 2026): source
• YachtBuyer, Breakthrough wins Motor Yacht of the Year 2026 (May 5, 2026): source
• YachtBuyer, Valor wins at World Superyacht Awards 2026 (May 5, 2026): source
• CharterWorld, World Superyacht Awards 2026 (May 4, 2026): source
• YachtBuyer, World Superyacht Awards 2016 Motor Yacht of the Year results (undated): source
• Feadship, Contact page with offices (undated): source
• Feadship, Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show events page (undated) and 2016 show preview (October 24, 2016): events page, 2016 preview
• Feadship, Feadship America commercial director appointment (February 17, 2017): source
• SuperYachts.com, How Feadship became one of the world’s most trusted custom shipyards (undated); Feadship Press room (checked November 1, 2026): SuperYachts.com, Feadship Press

Last updated November 1, 2026. Facts come from the sources listed above, checked on that date, and may change. Not legal, financial, tax or investment advice. Full disclaimer