A Constellation
at Sea
Conceived in Genoa with The Yacht Mogul and drawn by Abbasli Design Studio, the 63-metre Stardust proposes a superyacht organised entirely around light, water and the line of the horizon.
Most concept yachts lead with a number. Stardust leads with a metaphor — and then, unusually, builds the metaphor into steel. Sixty-three metres of hull are arranged so that, after dark, the vessel reads less as a boat than as a fragment of sky brought down to the waterline.
The project is a collaboration between three parties, each contributing a distinct instinct. Tankoa Yachts, the boutique shipyard in Genoa's Sestri Ponente, supplied the build culture and the engineering. The Yacht Mogul, a figure with reach across the luxury-yachting audience, supplied the brief and its ambition. And Abbasli Design Studio, whose exterior won an internal design competition against a field of emerging names, supplied the form. Interiors were curated by Giuseppina Arena. The stated aim was a rare one: perfect equilibrium between what happens inside the yacht and what happens on its decks.
What resulted is a vessel with a deliberately dual character — graceful lines wrapped around a bold, sporty temperament. The exterior is governed by a single sweeping "S" that carries the eye from the central superstructure back toward an expansive beach area. It is a shape built to move, and it looks fast even at rest. Beneath the styling sits an entirely conventional discipline: a steel hull, an aluminium superstructure, and a long-range profile intended for real distance rather than harbour theatre.
The distinctions accumulate quickly. There are two swimming pools — one at the heart of the beach club, a second reserved for the owner at the bow. There is a wellness club with an indoor gym and spa. There is a crow's nest perched on the wheelhouse deck, and an owner's suite that claims the entire upper deck for itself. Read together, these are not features stacked for a spec sheet. They are the working parts of a single idea about how time at sea should feel.
The 63M Stardust, read across every deck
A hull drawn as one continuous gesture
The exterior is the argument Abbasli Design Studio was hired to make, and it makes it in a single line. A magnificent "S" runs the length of the profile, sweeping the eye from the central nexus of the superstructure back toward the vast beach area that holds the main pool. It is the kind of shape that resolves a yacht's competing volumes into one movement — sporty where it needs tension, elegant where it needs calm. Even stationary, Stardust carries the posture of a vessel already underway.
That styling sits on a deliberately unglamorous foundation, and the discipline is the point. The hull is steel, the superstructure aluminium, and the proportions — 63 metres on an 11.30-metre beam — belong to a long-range displacement yacht rather than a fast cruiser. Large, full-height windows run the length of both the decks and the guest cabins, dissolving the boundary between the interior volumes and the sea they move through. The result is a boat that photographs as a sculpture and behaves as a ship.
Where the day gravitates
If the profile is where Stardust states its ambition, the beach area is where the ambition is spent. It is the immense volume around which shipboard life gathers: a central pool at its heart, and foldable platforms that extend the deck out over the water, turning the stern into a sea-level terrace when the yacht is at rest. The geometry is generous rather than clever — a place designed to hold a crowd or a single swimmer with equal ease.
From there the space flows, without a hard threshold, into the wellness club — an indoor gym and spa set behind the same floor-to-ceiling glazing, with a bar close at hand and a balcony that opens directly onto the sea. It is a rare piece of planning: fitness, water and horizon treated as a single continuous experience rather than three separate rooms. On Stardust, the boundary between working out and stepping into the Mediterranean is measured in a few paces.
One environment, observed in detail, motion and water
Interior · Detail
Wellness club · Gym
Beach area · Central pool
A superyacht of magical proportions.
Guido Orsi · Marketing Manager, Tankoa Yachts
Main saloon · Main deck
A wide interior, tuned to a quiet register
Giuseppina Arena's interiors resist the temptation that a concept of this scale invites. Rather than perform, they settle. The main saloon reads as a single generous volume — a lounge that gives way to a dining table set for twelve — held in a palette of pale surfaces, soft textiles and dark accents. Arena describes the intent as a harmony of opposing energies, sophisticated and modern yet acute and soft at once; in practice, it is a room with a personality that stays legible without ever raising its voice.
Light does most of the work. Floor-to-ceiling windows run the length of the main deck, drawing the horizon into the room and washing the interior in daylight from both sides. The layout is wide enough to invite more than one reading — a place to gather, a place to withdraw — and it is here that the yacht's guest accommodation is concentrated: five cabins on the main deck, among them a full-beam VIP suite generous enough to rival the master on many yachts a size smaller.
Owner's suite · Bedside
Owner's suite · Private terrace
The bow, given over to a single resident
The most consequential decision on Stardust is one of proportion. The owner's suite does not occupy part of a deck; it claims the entire upper deck as a private residence. The bedroom faces forward onto a second swimming pool, set into the bow and reserved for the owner alone, with a helipad positioned close by for direct arrivals. It is a rare inversion of the usual hierarchy — the front of the yacht, normally the domain of ground tackle and crew, handed over to the person the whole vessel exists to serve.
Higher still, the vessel keeps one more room in reserve. A crow's nest sits on the wheelhouse deck, and an open-air lounge nestles just forward of the wheelhouse — a vantage from which to take in the unfolding seascape by day or, true to the yacht's name, its namesake by night. These are not spaces a spec sheet accounts for easily. They are the places where the celestial premise stops being a metaphor and becomes somewhere to sit.
A steel hull tuned for distance, not display
Beneath the styling, Stardust is built to travel. Two Caterpillar 3512E diesels, each rated 1,491 kW at 1,600 rpm, drive a steel displacement hull to a top speed of 16 knots and a comfortable 15-knot cruise. The number that matters most, though, is the quiet one: a range of 5,000 nautical miles at 12 knots, drawn from 110,000 litres of fuel. This is a yacht conceived to cross, not merely to appear.
Comfort at that range is engineered rather than assumed. Two electrohydraulic stabiliser fins of five square metres each work to hold the deck steady, while three Caterpillar generators and a 180-kilowatt electric bow thruster handle hotel load and close-quarters manoeuvring. It is an unshowy package — the apparatus a yacht of this ambition needs simply to make its pools, its beach club and its wellness spaces usable in real conditions, far from a sheltered marina.
Sixty-three metres, read from keel to crow's nest
- Length overall
- 63 m · 206 ft
- Maximum beam
- 11.30 m · 37 ft
- Draught (full load)
- 3.20 m · 10.5 ft
- Gross tonnage
- Approx. 1,250 GT
- Displacement (full load)
- Approx. 1,050 t
- Hull · Superstructure
- Steel · Aluminium
- Propulsion
- 2 × Caterpillar 3512E · 1,491 kW at 1,600 rpm
- Generators
- 3 × Caterpillar 7.1 · 150 kWe at 1,800 rpm
- Bow thruster
- 1 × electric · 180 kW
- Stabilisation
- 2 × electrohydraulic fins · 5.0 m² each
- Fuel capacity
- 110,000 L
- Top speed · Cruise
- 16 knots · 15 knots
- Range
- 5,000 nm at 12 knots
- Accommodation
- Owner's suite (full upper deck) plus five guest cabins · including a full-beam VIP
- Exterior design
- Abbasli Design Studio
- Interior design
- Giuseppina Arena
- In collaboration with
- The Yacht Mogul
- Shipyard
- Tankoa Yachts · Genoa, Italy
- Status
- Concept · project
Concepts are easy to admire and hard to trust. Stardust earns the second reaction because its poetry is load-bearing — the celestial idea runs from the sweep of the hull to the pool at the bow to the lights that redraw the vessel after dark, and each of those gestures rests on steel, distance and a shipyard's discipline. It is a proposal for how a superyacht might make good on its own metaphor.
USA Onboard Editorial