LIFE BEYOND FIRST CLASS
DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE
BETWEEN TWO SEAS
For her first yacht interior, Stéphanie Coutas transforms the
54-meter Re Leone into a private world shaped by movement,
material, and the changing colors of water.
REBECCA ETORIA
PHOTOGRAPHY: YVAN MOREAU
Re Leone underway. The 54-meter Mangusta
Gransport marks Stéphanie Coutas’s first yacht
interior and a complete refit of the 2018 vessel.
In most houses, the view eventually becomes part of the architecture. At sea, it never has the chance.
The horizon moves. Light arrives differently from one anchorage to the next. A room surrounded by the hard blue of the Mediterranean may, months later, open onto the softer turquoise of the Caribbean. Even the view from the bed is temporary.
For Stéphanie Coutas, whose work has long been rooted in residential interiors, Re Leone presented an intriguing first. The 54-meter Mangusta Gransport, built in 2018, underwent a complete interior refit, but the challenge was larger than bringing her aesthetic aboard. Coutas was designing a private residence whose surroundings would never stay put.
On land, a designer can anticipate the landscape. A mountain remains in the distance. A garden matures outside the same window. The path of the sun can be studied across seasons. A yacht denies that certainty, and Coutas seems to have embraced the instability rather than design against it.
Her palette does not reproduce the sea so much as respond to it. Turquoise becomes brighter against deep water. Cream absorbs Mediterranean light. Polished timber changes character between morning and evening. Navy nearly disappears into the horizon before becoming graphic again against white wake. The interior is continually being rewritten by whatever happens beyond the glass.
The indoor living room layers glossy timber with Coutas’s
Lena sofas, bespoke furnishings and sculptural objects, creating
a softer counterpoint to the yacht’s polished architecture.
Perhaps that explains why the references to water are so indirect. Coutas avoids the usual shorthand of yacht interiors and lets the idea of the sea surface through material instead: rope wrapped around furniture, embroidery with organic forms, irregular ceramics, rugs washed in aquatic color. In the salon, her Lena sofas sit low against the windows, their richly worked backs bringing softness to the yacht’s polished architecture. The room feels collected rather than decorated, as though its character developed gradually instead of arriving fully furnished.
Art enters the conversation in much the same way. Behind the dining table, Atlantis, a large triptych from Coutas’s collection, appears almost geological. Its pale, heavily worked surface is interrupted by green tendrils and an intense blue center, while the wrapped detailing of the Ella dining chairs introduces another layer of texture. Nothing literally depicts the ocean, yet the room feels inseparable from it.
Coutas has not decorated a yacht around the idea of the sea. She has allowed the sea to become part of the interior.
That relationship becomes more intimate in the master suite. A custom raffia headboard blooms with oversized dimensional flowers that continue overhead, an unexpected gesture in a room surrounded by water. Pale aqua cabinetry and embroidered surfaces temper the existing timber, while the view beyond the doors becomes another color in the composition. There is a pleasant tension here between what Coutas can control and what she cannot. The room is complete, yet its backdrop never is.
Outside, the relationship reverses. The horizon no longer needs framing, and the furnishings are allowed greater visual weight. Navy sunbeds sharpen against teak. Turquoise rope meets open water. Orange surfaces briefly among the cushions. Coutas’s Mayan dining table, topped in Pietra Esmeralda marble, introduces the permanence of stone into an environment defined almost entirely by movement.
There is something unusually personal about Re Leone, too. Coutas did not simply furnish the yacht from a collection of familiar luxury houses. Her own design vocabulary follows the owner from room to room and onto the decks. Pieces from her indoor, outdoor, and SC Edition collections appear throughout, including the Puzzle, Ella, Lena, Cambium, Vala, and Jardin d’Eden designs. The effect is less about recognition than continuity. The yacht retains the hand of one designer.
Below, from left to right: In the dining room, Coutas’s Atlantis triptych anchors the space behind a Thalia table and Ella embroidered chairs, extending the yacht’s aquatic palette through art and texture; A guest cabin pairs a Manuel Canovas headboard with Nina Campbell wallpaper and decorative cushions, framed by custom furnishings from Celine Yette.
There is something unusually personal about Re Leone, too. Coutas did not simply furnish the yacht from a collection of familiar luxury houses. Her own design vocabulary follows the owner from room to room and onto the decks. Pieces from her indoor, outdoor, and SC Edition collections appear throughout, including the Puzzle, Ella, Lena, Cambium, Vala, and Jardin d’Eden designs. The effect is less about recognition than continuity. The yacht retains the hand of one designer.
Across Re Leone’s exterior decks, Coutas extends her design language into the open air with deep navy against teak, custom seating and pieces from her outdoor collections, including Sierra sunbeds and Vala tables.
There is something unusually personal about Re Leone, too. Coutas did not simply furnish the yacht from a collection of familiar luxury houses. Her own design vocabulary follows the owner from room to room and onto the decks. Pieces from her indoor, outdoor, and SC Edition collections appear throughout, including the Puzzle, Ella, Lena, Cambium, Vala, and Jardin d’Eden designs. The effect is less about recognition than continuity. The yacht retains the hand of one designer.
That may be the more revealing achievement of Coutas’s first venture onto the water. Yacht interiors can easily become exercises in accumulation, with exceptional materials, craftsmanship, technology, and art all competing for attention. Re Leone is more interested in sensation. How does a room feel when the water outside turns from cobalt to turquoise? What happens to texture beneath hard afternoon sun? How much should an interior say when the horizon is already doing so much?
Coutas answers largely through restraint. Her rooms have enough character to remain distinct, but enough composure to accept whatever arrives outside the glass. Morning changes them. Weather changes them. Geography changes them. That mutability becomes one of the yacht’s most compelling materials.
Perhaps that is the peculiar freedom of designing a home at sea. Architecture usually gives us permanence. It establishes an address, frames a landscape, and gradually becomes associated with one particular place. Re Leone offers another proposition. Its sense of place is not fixed to land at all.
Somewhere between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, Re Leone becomes a private world in transit, one whose colors and textures subtly change meaning depending on the water outside.
And tomorrow, the view will be different again.
Discover more of Stéphanie Coutas’s interiors, collections, and distinctive design world at stephaniecoutas.com.
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