How Luxury Yacht Owners Are Designing Vessels Around Health and Wellness

Between his deckhand duties aboard a 241.5-foot explorer, Sean Joyce had another role: wellness coach. Every morning, Joyce would present the 70-year-old owner and his 30-something son with three running routes: easy, medium, or hard. The two would choose over coffee, then head ashore with Joyce while the yacht cruised down the coast to meet them at the finish. Back on board, they’d jump into an ice bath. The routine continued for the three-month voyage from Bali to Sweden. “Their day was centered around wellness, rather than lounging,” says Joyce, now a project manager at Cookson Adventures who builds charters with a wholistic approach to health. During six years aboard a range of superyachts, Joyce watched onboard regimens shift from chilling out to working out: Beach clubs, once temples of relaxation, became gyms; helipads doubled as pickleball courts. As the personal trainer on a prestigious sailing superyacht and its support vessel, he would be in the gym nonstop from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. as guests filed in for exercise sessions. “Yachting’s obsessed with health and wellness,” he says. Today, crew often pursue advanced certification as yoga instructors, massage therapists, and nutrition-focused chefs to compete in this increasingly mindful market. The largest vessels, meanwhile, are being designed with fitness equipment and medical-grade treatment spaces more commonly found in clinics. Launched two years ago, the 400-foot Lürssen Kismet has a Balinese-inspired spa with a cryotherapy chamber, an ice-shaving station, and a chromotherapy bath, alongside a more orthodox sauna, plunge pool, and treatment room. On the 377-foot Ahpo, Venetian designer Nuvolari Lenard went a step further, conceiving the Lürssen around wellness for extended cruising. “Every design decision, from circulation and spatial planning to the atmosphere of the interiors” contributed to promoting healthy living on board, beyond the sky-deck gym or vast Zen center, according to cofounder Dan Lenard. Longevity is “becoming a new expression of luxury,” he adds. In June, Dutch shipyard Heesen unveiled the 236-foot Project Ananda. Its nearly 1,100-square-foot beach club will include a sauna, steam room, ice bath, snow shower, treatment room, and hyperbaric chamber. Longevity is pushing yacht design beyond a checklist of equipment toward a complete ecosystem. “Owners are becoming far more informed about how their environment affects sleep, recovery, energy levels, and long-term health,” says Heesen owner Laurens Last. He expects air purification, natural light, noise reduction, and thermal comfort to become integral to yacht design. The health trend is also reaching yachting’s entry level. California entrepreneur Scott Blum couldn’t find a model matching his active lifestyle, so he developed the 140-foot Sea Rover series, with the first vessel now in build in the Netherlands. The spa, gym, and sports court occupy prime real estate on the bridge deck, while the atrium-like “skywell” brings natural light to every deck. A must-have list of wellness features, including cold- and hot-plunge pools and an infrared therapy wall, determined the interior dimensions. Blum says the yacht itself was designed around the gym and the spa. “Whatever came after that was secondary,” he notes. By putting the spa before the staterooms, this design flips the superyacht script from conspicuous consumption to conscious longevity.