Bannenberg & Rowell

NEWS	PHOTOGALLERY

Everyone knew him by his initials – JB. He was an Australian kid with a gift for harmony – he’d studied the piano and dreamed of a career as a concert performer. When he arrived in London in the early 1960s he realised he had a talent for interior design. Jon Bannenberg invented his profession almost as a dare. The owner of a house he was modernising showed him the design for his new yacht. “It’s horrible,” said JB. “Oh yes? So do something better, if you can!,” said the client. The result stole the show at the 1963 London Boat Show. “Before JB the figure of the yacht designer, even the title, just didn’t exist,” said Australian designer Sam Sorgiovanni. For some of his most enthusiastic clients, like Ray Catena, JB was “the Frank Lloyd Wright of yachts”. For the many designers who grew up under his wing to become world names – Andrew Winch, Terence Disdale and Donald Starkey, for example – he was a guru. Dickie Bannenberg took over the running of the studio in 2002 after JB passed away. He says: “JB didn’t just create a long series of milestones in nautical design, he designed cars for Jensen and Rolls-Royce, jewels for S J Phillips of Bond Street, interiors for Air Malta’s jets and even a series of ultra-modern fireplaces for the National Coal Board.”

Only one of the ten people in the studio, James Carley, is a naval architect. Dickie has a geography degree, and Simon Rowell studied interior design “in the last century”, and for 15 years has designed hotel and restaurant interiors. “Anyone who comes to us doesn’t like following the crowd. They want to live in the future. We’re not interested in shocking people or creating sterile novelties,” says Dickie. “We want our design to be holistic – in fact, even though yachts are and will remain our core business, we’ve started to design cars, aircraft, trains and private homes. Our studio is a crucible for ideas from set design, architecture, car and motorbike design and even old black and white films.” This year, 2009 has been an important year for Bannenberg & Rowell. Five projects were completed and delivered – the 39-metre Kathleen Anne (Feadship-de Vries), the 41-metre Natori (Baglietto), the 45-metre Lady Sheila (Benetti Vision), the 60-metre Elandess (Abeking & Rasmussen) and the 60-metre Bacarella (Trinity Yachts). “Five yachts a year is a lot in a period of economic difficulty. After a series of excellent commissions for interiors we’re bringing the studio back to its great historical roots – designing exteriors and interiors together. We recently unveiled the new design for an innovative 73-metre by Abeking and Rasmussen and a 62-metre for Icon. Our lines are taut, almost tense, with new ideas on the architectural integration of the windows and new solutions for the exterior spaces. We want to change our approach to exteriors (sundecks, informal dining areas, bar areas, swimming pools) that for too long have been following a rather tired formula. We can do some good innovative work here, and the same is true for the equipment (antennae, radar, dishes) that all too often looks like it’s been stuck onto the boat as an afterthought.”

Attention to the exteriors is clear in designs like the Natori, where B&R have created external decks with symmetrical swimming pools and immense spaces comparable to much larger yachts. Simon Rowell is proud of the work done on the 60-metre from Abeking, Elandess. “It’s a good yacht with truly surprising interiors. I’d never designed a 15-seat sofa stretching along the skylounge in the shape of a question mark. The same’s true for the spiral staircase that seems to hang in the air while remaining a structural element. On this design, and in our new projects, there are more and more specially created pieces of furniture and objects. The owner’s glass and aluminium desk is another example of a unique piece designed with the client’s input.”

Perhaps the best example of Bannenberg & Rowell’s eclectic, holistic approach is the 85-metre Lürssen, with exterior design by Germán Frers. This yacht embodies the B&R mission into practice – “To take our clients with safety and skill into unknown areas.” There’s a whole kaleidoscope of influences – the Dr. Strangelove sets, Bond’s cars, the iTunes interface – made using two hundred materials. Take, for example, the spa with its acrylic and seaweed panels, or the owner’s library/cigar room, with a table inlaid in a way that recalls the veins of a cigar leaf. The table centrepiece is a retracting humidor, and the walls are decorated with work commissioned from an artist who uses cigar ash in his work. “We owe everything to our clients, their desire for adventure. There will always be clients who say ‘I want a yacht like that one’. But they don’t usually come knocking at our door. The people who come here want something special. Everything starts with one person’s imagination.” That was one of Jon Bannenberg’s favourite phrases!

Alex Roggero