Simonyi himself was very involved in the project, though he initially said he would only consult with the team on occasion. The naval architecture is by Lurssen, with the exterior by Espen Oino (9906 on the hull of Skat stands for Oino’s six design in the year 1999), and interiors by Marco Zanini and Flavia Alves De Souza. Painted in dull gray, with a steel hull and aluminum superstructure, Skat has a very high bow and a faceted superstructure with expansive glazing – yet another first for Lurssen, and for the industry as a whole at the time. For maximum comfort for the guests, Lurssen strayed out of its own comfort zone, and elastically-mounted everything that produced noise and vibration, from the engines to the air compressors, the generators, and the watermakers. Skat, which is an endearment term in Danish and means “treasure,” was designed for comfort, despite its aggressive stance, so it has a full displacement hull and 1,982 GT of interior volume. ![]() The result was a 70.7-meter (231-foot) superyacht with a distinctive silhouette, the kind that hadn’t been done until that moment. He wanted a seamless transition between the three. ![]() It’s no wonder, then, that he turned to geometry for his yacht, which he said he imagined as a continuation of his home and his private jet. Simonyi is a software architect whose work includes development for Excel and Word at Microsoft, with a very analytical mind. A very simple phrase at first look, but one that brings up incredible challenges. The brief for Skat, which had actually been shopped around to several shipyards before it was picked up by Lurssen, called for a yacht “pas tout à fait comme les autres,” a yacht unlike any other. Though it was not designed to be innovative, it ended up incorporating several industry firsts – including the unusual, military-inspired naval architecture. It’s no longer Simonyi’s home, having sold it at the end of 2021 for an undisclosed amount (estimates of its value put it at $60 million), but it remains one of the most instantly recognizable and memorable vessels of modern times. That floating home is Skat, launched by Lurssen in 2002. To counter this trend, he wanted a superyacht that looked exactly like what it was: steel and aluminum used to build a floating home. Most superyachts, though, look as if they’re “carved out of soft cheese” – at least to billionaire Charles Simonyi’s analytical, mathematical gaze. Some ships are designed to evoke speed even at anchor others are gigantic floating palaces that make no attempt to hide the kind of luxurious features offered inside.
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