The Maybach Ocean Club is a floating members’ club for the super-rich

The ability to completely get away from it all tends to be the preserve of the ultra-wealthy. But short of your own armoured compound in Hawaii or New Zealand and providing you don’t mind the close proximity of other 0.1 per cent-ers, one way to permanently elevate your lifestyle above the daily grind is to take to the waves.

Over the last few decades, several conceptual ideas for ship-based enclaves of the super-rich have been floated, with only The World of ResidenSea, launched as MS The World, actually making good the promise of a globe-roaming, tax-free bolthole on the high seas.

This is a shame, because apart from the societal benefits of corralling the world’s wealthy into a single hard-to-miss spot, there have been some genuinely outlandish ideas for floating utopias over the years. The almost farcically over-scaled Freedom Ship, a 1.8km-long barge for 80,000 refugees from restrictive taxation and legislation, has been drifting around the world’s drawing boards since the 1990s.

There’s also the faintly Logan’s Run-esque Serenity, a cruise colony for the over-eighties proposed by shipbuilder Meyer Werft, and the World City Phoenix project, an (unrealised) precursor from MS The World’s creator Knut Klosters. Originally conceptualised back in the 1980s by Danish ship designer Knud E.Hansen, the Phoenix was a floating resort for over 5,000 people.

Size isn’t everything (although tell that to the average superyacht owner). This is the Beyond Horizons, a proposed superyacht-scale private vessel housing an exclusive ocean-going members’ club. The concept is ‘Inspired by Maybach’, Mercedes-Benz’s luxury division, and translates the aggressively sybaritic design of its passenger cars across a series of staterooms, cabins and over 50,000 square feet of deck.

The Maybach Ocean Club is essentially a superyacht membership club, with scope and style that harks back to the final glory years of the grand ocean liners in the 1920s. Back then, the Maybach brand had a marine propulsion branch (it also made Zeppelin engines), so Mercedes-Benz Design has deemed fit to bring the Maybach emblem and ethos into this shiny new world at sea.

As these renders show, it’s an environment scrubbed clean by an army of invisible deckhands to achieve the eternal newness of a turnkey chalet, Miami beach house or Dubai penthouse. The carmaker’s property arm, Mercedes-Benz Places, is already building high-rise real estate in Miami and Dubai, so a superyacht seems like the next logical move.

If you can’t stomach the fortune-draining running costs of a regular superyacht (roughly 10 per cent of the purchase price, year on year), or simply wish to cosplay Agatha Christie or Rian Johnson, perhaps the Maybach Ocean Club could be your new home from home.

The proposal was launched in Fort Lauderdale in November 2025, with Gorden Wagener, chief design officer for the Mercedes-Benz Group AG, overseeing the reveal of a scale model and imagery of the Beyond Horizons. ‘Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach are credited with building one of the first motorboats powered by an internal combustion engine; this legacy of innovation at sea informed our design process and inspired us to go beyond expectations,' Wagener said.

The MD and co-founder of the Maybach Ocean Club, Michael Hehn, describes the service as a ‘new model that enhances the joys of yachting without the burden of management and maintenance. This club reflects Maybach’s spirit of innovation but also speaks to something timeless – sharing special places and experiences with people who matter most in our lives,’ Hehn continues.

The boat itself will be overseen by German naval architects and consultants Dölker + Voges and there’s no word of an official launch date just yet.

More information at Mercedes-Benz.com and Maybach-Ocean-Club.com