Dream

36 GUESTS

As we step on to the broad swimplatform and up to the aft deck, feeling a little as if we’ve just been rescued, 106.5-metre Dreamtowers above us, overwhelming in scale. And that’s just what you can see from the aft deck:there are also two lifts and four staircases for guests alone; a 260-square-metre master cabin, a 400- square-metre main saloon, a cinema and 22 guest cabins; a hotel-sized warren of crew and service areas (where a kindly stewardess tumble-dries my dress); six pantries and more than 270 kilometres of electrical cable powering it all. There are so many enormous decks that the GA takes up two whole pages at the end of this feature.

Huge elegance

They also assembled a crack team of workers and designers with a wealthof experience, tapping established Greek- born, Italy-based yacht designer Giorgio Vafiadis to pen the new exterior and GA. Interior designers Simone Ciarmoli and Miguel Queda worked for years at powerhouse fashion brands, including Valentino, Prada and Armani before founding their own interior design firm, Ciarmoli Queda Studio, in Milan in 2009.

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Yacht details

“The other diferent thing about this project is that he wanted to build a boat himself,” says Dendrinos. “So this means that we hired a place in a shipyard in Greece and we organiszd from scratch. We designed, engineered and built everything for this project. We produced internally all the construction drawings for steel, systems, piping, integration and interior sub-constructions. We had subcontractors only for painting and the interiors.”Ciarmolinotes that making a success of the unorthodox set-up was one of their greatest achievements. “It was not like Lürssen or Baglietto or Azimut. It was us: Simone and Miguel [and Vafiadis]; it was George, Nikolas and his team. And it was a big challenge,” he says.Given the scope of the conversion this was certainly an ambitious project to tackle independently – the only original elements to remain were the hull and the engine room.
So why do it this way? If you’re replacing so much, why not build from scratch? “I do know that he enjoys very much the construction at every stage,” says Vafiadis. “He was going to the yard almost every other day. And he likes to see the things coming. So once you have something existing it is easy to see what is coming – if you start from zero, you don’t see what is coming. Although you see renderings, it’s not like seeing the thing and saying here we do this, there we do that.”As Prokopiou recalls: “Every evening we had an hour-long phone call with Nikolas reviewing all these [details]. This was a pleasure. I think as much as possible in terms of every detail, because I enjoy having such a good response; giving a small idea and then to see it in a drawing the next day – this is a huge advantage and it gives you the courage to do more things.You just say an idea, and then immediately… improved.