I
am standing in a marble-tiled shower that is larger than my bathroom. It has two enormous rain showerheads and space for maybe ten, certainly six, people to comfortably wash at the same time. Even if you want to get sexy in your shower, this is larger than necessary, I suggest to Bas Swanink, who is showing me around. “Well, that depends on your definition of sexy,” he says, raising a mischievous eyebrow.
He is the sales director at Oceanco, a builder of superyachts. And the bathroom he has let me nose about in is not in a house, it is on a boat — a very large boat. Its code name is Y722, a monster of a superyacht, 111m long, the equivalent of about 13 red London buses parked nose to tail. It is in the process of being fitted out — electricians, carpenters and engineers are crawling through hatches, sanding, drilling and buffing various cabins — in a vast Oceanco hangar just south of Rotterdam, before being handed over to its billionaire client, believed to be Gabe Newell.
You may not have heard of Newell, but the American, who made his fortune from video games such as Half-Life, is estimated by Forbes to be worth $9.5 billion and is thought to own more superyachts than anyone else (six, possibly seven). Last month it was announced that Newell likes Oceanco so much that he bought the manufacturer, a favourite of billionaires with deep pockets such as Lakshmi Mittal and Jeff Bezos, whose Koru, built by Oceanco, is a 127m, three-mast yacht, one of the largest sailing boats in the world. “We definitely build the coolest boats,” Swanink says.
