Feadship HIVE: A 115-Metre Yacht Designed Around Life
YACHTS / DESIGN / CONCEPTS
At 115 metres, Feadship’s HIVE could have been an exercise in scale. What interests me is the opposite: a yacht imagined from the small, human question of how people want to spend time together.
A yacht this large can easily turn into a list of rooms, amenities and numbers. HIVE starts somewhere more interesting. Feadship says its design began with a fictional family of four and with the rhythms of life on board: when people want to gather, when they want to disappear for a while, and how a yacht can make both feel natural.
That is the idea I keep coming back to. The scale is extraordinary; the point of departure feels personal.
Revealed during the 2026 Monaco Yacht Show, HIVE is Feadship’s largest concept design to date. Studio De Voogt, led by senior designer Jan Schaffers, developed it alongside Feadship’s naval architects and engineering specialists. It remains a concept design, not an announced yacht order. Feadship presents it as a study of ideas its teams believe can be engineered and built.
A shared heart, with room to find your own way
The name describes the organising principle. At the centre is an open volume spanning four decks. On the main deck it can become a saloon, a stage or an auditorium. Terraces open to port and starboard; curved staircases lead to balconies and quieter rooms above. Service pantries, furniture storage and a green room are designed to let the space change with the occasion.
Feadship says conversations with six finalists from the Boat International Young Designer of the Year competition helped shape the concept. Their discussions kept returning to the balance between being together and following separate interests. HIVE gives that tension an architectural answer: a shared centre, surrounded by places to retreat, explore or simply look out at the water.
I like that ambition more than another grand room built only to impress. A space that can host family life in the morning and a performance in the evening has a reason to exist beyond its dimensions.
A garden above, a view below
The rest of the yacht is conceived as a sequence of very different moods. A two-storey beach lounge leads to dining at water level for 24 or more. Forward, a circular glass-enclosed library opens onto a secluded garden. An observation lounge has a retractable glass roof, letting the night sky become part of the room.
On the owner’s deck, a 20-metre pool uses Feadship’s patented ContraWave technology and continues indoors as a suspended, glass-bottomed infinity pool. Below the waterline, an underwater lounge looks out beneath the surface.
These are spectacular spaces, but the more telling move is how they connect. HIVE is presented less as a vertical stack of decks than as a set of places that shift between social, intimate and open-air life.
A new profile—and a serious engineering brief
Outside, HIVE has a long, low silhouette with broad areas of glass and integrated terraces. A virtual command centre uses cameras and sensors to provide navigation information, while retractable glass wing stations give the crew a direct view outside during close-quarters manoeuvring. The intention is to free the forward superstructure for owner accommodation and an observation lounge.
The proposed electrical architecture combines three 900 kW variable-speed permanent-magnet generators running on HVO, fuel cells and a 5 MWh lithium-ion battery bank. Feadship outlines two possible zero-emission-at-the-vessel fuel-cell configurations: seven 75 kW solid-oxide units, or nine 250 kW PEM units with a methanol reformer. Voith Schneider propellers are specified for precise, omnidirectional thrust and low-noise manoeuvring.
Those are concept specifications, not operating results from a completed yacht. The distinction matters. A design study can be technically ambitious without pretending that its proposed systems have already been proven together at sea. Feadship’s own history gives these studies weight: the yard says ideas explored in earlier concepts have later appeared in delivered yachts.
My kind of ambition
I am not drawn to HIVE simply because it is enormous. What stays with me is the attempt to make scale feel generous rather than grandiose: one shared heart, quieter rooms around it, and several ways to meet the sea.
For a yacht of 115 metres, that is a better question than how many amenities can be fitted inside. Can the architecture change how time on board feels? HIVE is still a vision, but it has a point of view—and that is where good yacht design begins.
Further reading: Feadship’s official HIVE presentation and media kit · Boat International Young Designer of the Year
By Patrice Meignan — TRANSMISSION by TheArsenale. Images: Feadship / Studio De Voogt.
