Easy-going

There is no sea in Florence, of course, but it seems to have a creativity energy spilt into the very air, with shipyards in Livorno, Viareggio and La Spezia not too far away. Several famous yacht designers are based in the city.

One of them is Luca Dini. The cheerful Tuscan has been running his studio for 25 years. If the 79 superyachts he has designed were to line up, they would stretch to a length of 3.6 kilometers line. The fourth kilometer will soon be reached: 13 more yachts are being built right now.

Luca Dini Design & Architecture is located on the pretty Via Venezia in the San Marco district. The street is a Florence-style stone street, but there is plenty of greenery around: across the street is a garden, around the corner is the Gardens della Gherardesca, adjacent to the Four Seasons, and a little further away is the Botanical Gardens. In the studio, decorated in contemporary Italian style, there are lavishly decorated knight's lats - props from the «Cinecittà» movie studio.

An appropriate entourage for a “renaissance man,” who leads simultaneously an unimaginable number of projects in different spheres. Dini also has hit the news headlines many times this year.

He is credited for the exterior and interior of one of the most interesting premieres of the upcoming Monaco Yacht Show, the Columbus 50-meter K2 with a straight bow. The fully custom yacht is based on the 43-meter-long Columbus Sport, which Dini presented at the Monaco Yacht Show a year ago. The client ordered it and then wanted a longer one. K2 is designed to be a versatile yacht for both pleasure and charter, suitable for both America and the Mediterranean.

Dini is specifically good at designing sport yacht ranges. In July, the first model of Tankoa's new Linea Sportiva, a 55-meter model, was unveiled via Zoom. The exterior looks sporty, but the designer has not forgotten about comfort. At the stern, there is a large beach club with a swimming pool recessed into the terrace. It also provides access to the spa center with a gym and sauna, located on the lower deck. There is also a garage with a side-hinged panel for launching tenders and water toys and a large viewing window as well. The window is partially below the waterline, allowing you to admire the marine life. The layout is variable: guests can be accommodated in four or five cabins on the lower deck, while the master suite with its own Jacuzzi occupies space on the main deck, board to board wide.

While Columbus and Tankoa have given Dini full control over their projects, his work with the Heesen shipyard in the Netherlands started with the interiors of semi-custom production yachts. His first project was Gemini. The boat belonged to the same series as Castor and Pollux, presented at the Cannes Yachting Festival. It will be built in 2022. For Gemini, his field of competency became the internal volume of about 760 gross tons and about 400 square meters of interior space, which had to be designed to create a sense of noble luxury. The style by Luca Dini Design & Architecture turned out to be meditative and relaxed with a restrained color scheme. The leitmotif of this interior is pure horizontal and vertical lines, warm glossy wood and natural stone in the interior decoration, doors upholstered in special leather intended for use in marine environments, and fabric-covered ceilings.

In parallel with the yachting projects, the architectural and furniture design trend is in full swing of development. Luca Dini decided to find a new use for marble and in the summer of 2021 launched a collection of furniture. Minimalist chaise lounges, armchairs, tables, vases, and bar stools will look impressive both on the deck of a superyacht and in a private residence on the shore. Marble can be easily combined with wood, metal, and fabrics. Each stone plate has a unique pattern of veins and a palette of shades, so each piece of interior will be unique. Dini has divided them into two lines: Spheric (with streamlined shapes) and Cubic (with straight lines). The furniture will be produced by Franchi Umberto Marmi (FUM), an Italian company specializing in marble products. It will use Carrara marble of two types - Calacatta Franchi and Grigio Collemandina.

In the future, one of the most ambitious projects is going to be the participation in the architectural design and decoration of NEOM. Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud wants to build a “smart” city in the desert in ten years for half a trillion dollars. It will be located by the Red Sea, which means there will be a yachting infrastructure. Which means they would need a designer with yachting experience. Who else, if not Luca Dini?

When looking at these diverse projects, one can see that a vocation will always find a person. When Luca Dini was young, he didn't even think about design and went to study law. He recalls that he didn't particularly want to become a lawyer. He just knew that there were a lot of beautiful girls and fun parties at law school. He had studied (or rather, hung out) for two years, and then he met some architects he knew, who opened their own studio with a separate division for yacht design. He joined them and decided to go into design. And now he has been in business for 34 years.

Something vague has been looming before as well. Last year he presented Gentleman's Yacht, a retro Codecasa project with a mahogany swim platform. Describing the yacht, Dini spoke with a sense of lyricism that as he drew its lines (he works by hand first and then digitizes the results), he recalled the boats that he had seen as a boy in Livorno.