Malcolm McKeon takes the helm of new design studio
In his first interview since departing Dubois Naval Architects, Malcolm McKeon discusses his vision for superyacht design, business and the future and confirms he will not be working on the 101m project with Dubois.…
Malcolm McKeon is in an interesting situation. As the former lead naval architect at Dubois Naval Architects (DNA) and one of the most respected large yacht designers in the world, he can stand proudly on his reputation as a visionary professional and a dedicated craftsman of incredibly gorgeous boats. But, after his recent split with Ed Dubois, with whom he worked, for more than 30 years, McKeon cannot actually publicise any of his previous design work.
“Everything I’m working on right now is about my future,” McKeon told me when we spoke recently. “Ed Dubois asked me if I wanted to consult on the big 101m sloop project which I’d started while with DNA and I said ‘no.’ I just thought it would be confusing to the industry, and I wanted to make a clean break. It was time for me to move on, really.” Currently, the 101m project has all of its concept work and general arrangement drawings completed and is now out to tender—which always provides a bit of a lull in the design process while the client decides with which yard to build.
McKeon works from his new studio in Lymington, England on ongoing projects
McKeon’s decades of experience alongside Dubois means he has had a hand in every large yacht project that’s emerged from the DNA offices. Upon his departure, he’s had a fantastic amount of support from the industry and from clients, evidenced by the buzz around him at GSF this past November. Now, starting fresh, he is still hard at work on two projects under construction, each with about a year to go, whose clients have asked McKeon to oversee to completion. One is a motor yacht at Feadship DeVries and another a 46m performance sailing yacht building at Vitters.
Amongst his many ambitions, he said, is to also design high-performance carbon superyachts. “I’ve been trying to push carbon construction for years, and clients have been resisting it,” McKeon said. “It’s not the cost that puts them off; it’s the reliability and the resale value. A few carbon boats some years ago had problems, and its set the thinking back. I was very close to completing the design work on two boats in carbon recently, but they each went ahead as aluminium hulls instead. In the early days when I designed the racing boats, I did the entire composite engineering myself, before the likes of great companies like Gurit came about.”
McKeon plans to keep his operation small. Currently he’s working from offices in an annex on his property in Lymington, UK, and he’s hiring, but carefully. He looks with admiration at Andrew Winch whose large studio designs everything from boats to planes to houses, but tells me he sees the ideal business model in Tim Heywood’s approach—effectively just one man. “I think we all aspire to that, really,” McKeon said. That said, he enjoys working with a small team and is putting one together now that will “work very efficiently.”
“I’ve got ideas I want to progress, and I just want to do it my own way,” McKeon said. He’s focusing on contemporary design ideas, enabling simpler, less expensive builds while setting a new distinct style and improved standards of comfort and performance.
“I also want to develop the green side of things,” he said. “I know this subject has received a fair amount of attention, and it’s something that a superyacht is not, but I just feel that there are ways of building and operating these boats in a greener way.”
He’s also careful not to duplicate work produced by the shipyard. “In the old days when you drew things by hand, the designer didn’t go to the level of construction detail we see today,” he said. “The Loft Floor extrapolated everything from the hand drawings, and developed things at full size—a lot of the final construction details were down to the shipyard. Now, I feel that design offices—not the ones I’ve been involved in, but others I know of—have been taking on a lot of the work that traditionally shipyards have done. And then the shipyards just generate it again, which means there’s a lot of duplication and inefficiency. My focus is on the performance, styling and aesthetic detail of design."
McKeon says he remains focused on sailing yachts, though he’s very happy to also design motor yachts—as he has done for clients that have had sailing boats in the past. “I’m happy to design classic sailing yachts, but my passion is with contemporary style —it’s what has driven me for many years.”
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