Matteo Thun and Antonio Rodriguez shape Azimut’s new flagship yacht, Seadeck 9

Azimut Yachts, the Italian luxury motor yacht brand, has just unveiled Seadeck 9, the largest yacht ever to roll out of its Avigliana shipyard and the new, gleaming flagship of a series that is quietly rewriting what luxury at sea is supposed to look like. The size makes headlines. The credits are the real story.

For the interiors, Azimut skipped the yacht-design establishment entirely – no ateliers steeped in gold leaf and gangway glamour – and instead hired Matteo Thun and Antonio Rodriguez, the Milan-based architecture studio behind the beloved Vigilius Mountain Resort and two decades of hospitality and healthcare projects built on a devotion to material longevity and unshowy sustainability. Neither had designed so much as a dinghy's cabin before this commission. Bold move. It paid off.

The absence of yacht-design convention shows the second you step aboard. Seadeck 9's defining flourish is a 180-degree pool deck and a run of cascading terraces that pull the pool level with the waterline, dissolving the usual hierarchy of a superyacht, in which the upper decks perform for guests while the lower decks quietly, invisibly, serve them. Here, everything just flows downhill toward the water, like the boat forgot it was supposed to be showing off.

'When Alberto Mancini started designing Seadeck, he had a very simple idea,' says Giovanna Vitelli, Chair of Azimut|Benetti, of the yacht's naval architect. 'If you can't contain the sea, then you become part of it. The 180° Pool Deck, the cascading terraces and the pool flush with the deck – everything flows naturally, taking you from the water straight into the heart of the yacht.'

Vitelli has overseen Azimut's product development and R&D since 2004 and became Chair in 2023. It was her push toward external architects, a break from her father Paolo Vitelli's five-decade in-house model, that opened the door to briefs like this one.

Materials carry the same logic through the interior, and there's poetry in the specifics. Palettes run in sand and cream tones intended to blur the line between deck and horizon, so you're never quite sure where the boat ends and the Mediterranean begins.

The carpet underfoot – soft, unassuming, easy to miss – is woven from yarn recovered from discarded fishing nets. 'It's a small detail,' Vitelli says, 'but it says a lot about the thinking behind the whole project.' Quite. Thun and Rodriguez specified recycled or recyclable materials wherever the brief allowed, treating sustainability less as a checkbox than as a texture.

Seadeck 9 also marks Azimut's first hybrid production series, built on a carbon-fibre hull for weight savings that translates directly into fuel efficiency. Rather than let 'sustainable' stay a marketing word, Azimut is now benchmarking its boats against the SEA Index and YETI ratings, third-party tools that give owners, brokers and insurers a comparable efficiency figure instead of a claim.

'I often talk about gentle technology,' Vitelli says. 'Technology shouldn't dominate the experience. It should work quietly in the background, allowing people to enjoy the sea without distraction. Hull efficiency, hybrid propulsion and lightweight carbon-fibre construction – none of these innovations is there simply to impress. They're not about speed; they're about delivering more comfort, more silence, better efficiency and, ultimately, more freedom.'

That principle extends to Hotel Mode, which lets owners drop anchor for hours with the generators switched off entirely – no hum, no diesel smell, nothing but the boat, the stars and the water, doing its shimmering thing.

'For me, the ultimate luxury is silence,' Vitelli says. 'When everything becomes quiet, you feel completely at one with the sea.' It's the sort of line that could sound like brochure copy from anyone else. From her, standing in front of the boat, it doesn't.

She reaches, unexpectedly, for a lyric to explain where she thinks luxury is headed. 'There's an old Italian song called Sapore di sale. Every Italian knows it. It's about the feeling of salt on your skin after a swim, lying in the sun with someone you love. I think that's where luxury is going. It's no longer about showing off – it's about moments like that.'

Behind the launch, rather charmingly, is a €50 million investment in expanding the Avigliana shipyard, which sits in the foothills of the Alps, nowhere near the water the boats it produces are destined for.

'I always find it quite special that we design and build yachts in the mountains for a life at sea,' Vitelli says. 'Seadeck 9 is an investment not only in our facilities, but in the future direction of the company.'

Mountains to sea, hoteliers to hulls – Azimut seems to be making a habit of hiring for the job it wants, not the job it's always had.

AzimutYachts.com, @Azimut_Yachts