For over two decades, Maxime d’Angeac has quietly accumulated one of French architecture’s most covetable portfolios, not least the flagship boutiques for Hermès and Guerlain, bespoke interiors for Daum, and the full redesign of the Orient Express train carriages, the first such overhaul in nearly a century. What he had never done was anything remotely nautical, a fact that did not deter the Accor Group’s chairman and CEO Sébastien Bazin, who tapped him in 2022 to design the world’s largest sailing yacht for the Orient Express marque.
There were loud doubters.
The Orient Express Corinthian sets sail
‘Everyone told me it would not be possible,’ d’Angeac now says, with the measured satisfaction of someone who has just proven a great many people wrong. Forty-four months after the idea of the yacht was first green-lit at the Monaco Yacht Show in September 2022, the Orient Express Corinthian (which we previewed in 2024) is afloat, and the sceptics are conspicuously quieter.
That 44-month sprint – from a blank page to a completed vessel this April – produced what is, for now anyway, the world's largest sailing yacht. At 220m and carrying just 110 guests across 54 suites, the Orient Express Corinthian is, in the most literal sense, an exercise in deliberate restraint at impossible scale.
Three 100m carbon masts, each installed with millimetric precision using aerospace-grade guidance systems, carry 4,500 sq m of SolidSail rigid sails – a proprietary technology developed by ship-builder Chantiers de l’Atlantique that allows the yacht to run entirely on wind, reaching 17 knots in favourable conditions. An LNG engine stands ready for when the weather declines to cooperate.
The interiors – which include five restaurants, eight bars, a recording studio, cinema, and spa – operate on two distinct silhouettes. Decks four, five and six channel the mood of early 20th-century ocean liner glamour, with oak and afromosia panelling, Eramosa and Calacatta Viola marble, discreet mouldings and the warm tonal restraint of a grand salon. The reference point is deliberate: the SS Normandie, built at the very same Chantiers de l’Atlantique yard in the 1930s, remains d’Angeac’s north star – not as nostalgia, he insists, but as a benchmark for what total design conviction looks like.
The lobby, meanwhile, pays direct tribute to Jean Dunand, the great art deco lacquerer, with three monumental bas-relief panels depicting scenes of the sea in the tradition of 1930s decorative craft. Handmade by French maître d’art Etienne Rayssac and cast in plaster from original moulds, each panel took a year to complete.
Deck seven is an altogether different proposition. Here, d’Angeac dispensed with straight lines entirely. The six premium suites – each 220 sq m – are conceived in smoked eucalyptus, their curves unbroken by hard angles or visible doors, the latter folded seamlessly into the walls. ‘It is my idea of what Orient Express could be in 2050,’ he says. ‘A new chapter for the brand that is not only about the past.’ The custom carpets throughout, woven to bespoke drawings that had to be re-adjusted each time a corridor shifted during construction, are among the more quietly heroic achievements on board.
Outdoor spaces were engineered with equal rigour. A 14m pool sits on deck five, while a 17m lap pool occupies deck six – the former partially open to the sky through an oculus cut into the roof to draw natural light deep into the vessel. The teak-look pool decking, almost as good as the real thing, was developed with French specialist Boldt to withstand salt, heat and constant moisture, without, as d’Angeac pointedly notes, harvesting a single Burmese hardwood tree.
The Corinthian’s inaugural voyage departs the French Riviera in June, tracing the Italian coastline through the season’s early months. By October, she sets course for the Caribbean. Her sister vessel, the Orient Express Olympian, is due in April 2027, her construction proceeding at a considerably faster pace that reflects lessons learned from the prototype. Asia itineraries may well follow for the Olympian – a prospect that would bring the Orient Express full circle, back to the storied eastern routes that first made the brand a legend.
