Yacht Lounge explores stories behind yachts, luxury objects, and style choices through immersive audio interpretations. An independent podcast by Roberto Franzoni & Andrea Baracco, offering authentic insights beyond commercial logic. Learn more and subscribe for free at yachtlounge.substack.com <br/><br/><a href="https://yachtlounge.substack.com/s/podcast-uk?utm_medium=podcast">yachtlounge.substack.com</a>
Yacht Lounge Podcast UK
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24 episodes
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Podcast Overview
Yacht Lounge explores stories behind yachts, luxury objects, and style choices through immersive audio interpretations. An independent podcast by Roberto Franzoni & Andrea Baracco, offering authentic insights beyond commercial logic. Learn more and subscribe for free at yachtlounge.substack.com <br/><br/><a href="https://yachtlounge.substack.com/s/podcast-uk?utm_medium=podcast">yachtlounge.substack.com</a>
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Publishing Since
11/14/2025
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Recent Episodes
June 10, 2026
Bernard Moitessier. The Sling.
<p>It was August 23, 1968. Bernard Moitessier left Plymouth aboard Joshua — a steel ketch, twelve meters, nothing but a compass and a sextant — and disappeared south. No radio. No way to communicate with the world except by slinging messages onto the decks of passing ships. He was competing in the Golden Globe, the first solo race around the globe.</p><p>Ahead of him: a solo, non-stop circumnavigation. The first time in history.</p><p>He wasn’t the favorite on paper. But he was the most prepared in the way that matters — the kind that can’t be measured in technical specs. Moitessier knew the sea the way you know your mother tongue. He was practically born into it. Son of French Indochina, raised in the Gulf of Siam among fishermen and pirogues, he had already lost two boats on distant reefs and each time had started over. The sea wasn’t his sport. It was his grammar.</p><p>Nine set out. One finished — Robin Knox-Johnston, the Brit, who won by default. Because Moitessier, who was in the lead, decided not to arrive.</p><p>Seven months at sea. That’s the number you need to hold in your head to understand what happened next.</p><p>Seven months without land underfoot. Without a human voice, without a face, without a sound that wasn’t wind, water, the boat. Joshua pushed south, rounded the three great capes — Good Hope, Leeuwin, Horn — and Moitessier was there, alone, steering, reading the sea, sleeping a few hours at a time and waking every twenty minutes to check course.</p><p>Solitude at those latitudes is not the solitude of an empty room. It’s something physical, atmospheric. The Roaring Forties and the Screaming Fifties aren’t poetic names — they’re zones where the wind blows without pause because there’s no land to stop it, where swells arrive from the other side of the world and build into twenty-meter walls of water. No harbor within thousands of miles. No rescue possible.</p><p><p>Secret Ocean: the Atlantic crossing podcast. 👇</p></p><p>And yet Moitessier wrote something in his logbook that no one expected: that he was happy. That the solitude didn’t weigh on him — it lightened him. That in those months in the middle of the ocean he had found something he couldn’t even look for on land.</p><p>“There was only Joshua and I in the world. The rest didn’t exist, had never existed.”</p><p>It wasn’t misanthropy. It was the discovery that certain things are only visible when the noise stops. And the noise of the world — expectations, contracts, other people’s opinions, the pressure of being someone — really only stops in the middle of the ocean, when you’re seven hundred miles from the nearest coast and the only thing that matters is holding course.</p><p>After rounding Cape Horn, arrival was weeks away. France was waiting. A fleet of boats was already prepared to escort him up the Channel. The Legion of Honor. Newspapers. Photographs. The return of the solo sailor transformed into a national hero.</p><p><p>The man who turned east knew someone who had done it before anyone else. 👇</p></p><p>Moitessier thought about it. He wrote in his log: “leaving Plymouth to return to Plymouth feels like leaving from nothing to return to nothing.” It wasn’t the finish line that repelled him. It was what arrival carried with it. The glory, the publicity, having to become the hero others had already decided he was.</p><p>He spotted a passing cargo ship. He came alongside with Joshua, loaded his sling, and launched a film canister onto the deck. Inside was a message addressed to the Sunday Times, the race organizers.</p><p>“I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific because I am happy at sea, and perhaps to save my soul.”</p><p>Then he turned east. And kept going.</p><p>He didn’t win the race. He didn’t return to France. He sailed for another three months, crossed the Pacific again, rounded Cape Leeuwin a second time, and arrived in Tahiti on June 21, 1969 — after ten months at sea, without ever touching land.</p><p>The sports world didn’t know how to classify him. He had abandoned the race. Technically it was a retirement. But he had completed one and a half solo non-stop circumnavigations — something no one had ever done and no one would do again for years. He had won something that had no name.</p><p>What Moitessier refused is exactly what modern yachting chases. Rankings, visibility, titles. Today’s superyachts carry crews of thirty, Michelin-starred galleys, stabilizers that eliminate roll. The boat as an extension of power, success, social identity. Nothing wrong with that — everyone chooses their own sea.</p><p>But Joshua had bare steel, no comfort, a sling as its only instrument of communication with the world. And its skipper, after seven months alone in the most violent ocean on earth, had understood one thing: he didn’t want to stop.</p><p>“I want to forget completely about land, its cruel cities, its blind crowds and its thirst for a meaningless rhythm of existence.”</p><p>The sling is still the most radical gesture the sea has ever inspired. Not the crossing, not the storm weathered, not the record. The gesture of someone who held victory in his hands and let it go — because it was worth less than what he had found in its place.</p><p>The Pacific is still out there. And somewhere, in the middle of the ocean, there is still someone who understands what Moitessier meant.</p><p>by Andrea Baracco</p><p>Stories like this are the heartbeat of Yacht Lounge. If you value this level of insight, join our 3,800 active readers to receive weekly perspectives you won’t find anywhere else.</p><p><p>Another way to experience the sea 👇</p></p><p><p>This episode is also available in Italian. 👇</p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://yachtlounge.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">yachtlounge.substack.com</a>
May 26, 2026
Philippe Starck: Genius or Illusionist?
<p>Philippe Starck has sold the most profitable idea of our time: that taste is democratic. He did it with a juicer that barely juices, a motorcycle nobody really rode, and a 143-meter yacht that is, fundamentally, a floating insult to the rest of the planet. All of it signed, naturally. Because without a signature, it’s just weird stuff.</p><p>The truth is, Starck doesn’t sell objects. He sells a membership ritual. Buy the juicer and you become a designer-citizen, one of the people who “gets it.” Buy the motorcycle and you wear the badge of a commercial failure like it’s a medal. Buy the yacht — well, if you buy the yacht, you’re already the lead in a private cinematic production of which you are also the sole audience. The designer simply wrote the script.</p><p>The Cult: When Design Becomes a Religion</p><p>Starck’s recipe has one stated ingredient: design must “improve everyone’s life.” Sounds good. Sounds very good. Sounds exactly like the kind of thing you say at a TED Talk before heading back to the studio to sketch a sailing hull for an oligarch whose life, judging by the balance sheet, has no particular urgency of improvement.</p><p>The Starck paradox goes like this: the man who built his reputation on transparent chairs, sculptural faucets, and designer plates is the same one who handed the ultra-rich their most recognizable symbols of status. That’s not a contradiction. It’s a business model. With Starck, you don’t buy an object — you buy an aesthetic alibi: “I chose design, not just money.” The money is still there, obviously, but now it has cleaner lines and a catalog number.</p><p>Starckian design is the most expensive and most elegant logo in the world. It turns the exquisite into a moral label. And those of us who belong to this world know it perfectly well — which makes the whole thing more entertaining and just slightly unsettling.</p><p>The Motò 6.5: Icon of Defeat</p><p>The Aprilia Motò 6.5 is the most honest document in Starck’s catalog. A front end that looks like it survived a crash test with its dignity intact, bodywork that cradles the engine like a museum artifact, a frame designed, clearly, for gallery space rather than an actual highway. The result: total commercial flop, instant cult status. The market rejected it; collectors fought over it. Rarely has failure been so lucrative.</p><p>That strange front end — borderline ridiculous, and we say that with full respect for the ridiculous — is not a design mistake. It’s a signature. It’s the calling card of someone who knows his audience doesn’t buy to use, but to own. The bodywork is a sculpture that doesn’t breathe; the bike is beautiful but it was never meant to be understood by the people riding it. And that’s exactly where the Motò 6.5 stops being a vehicle and becomes a manifesto: an object that openly asserts its right to be nothing but an icon. No pretense of utility. No apologies.</p><p>The market condemned it. Design history canonized it. Starck, in all likelihood, saw both coming.</p><p>The Yacht: The Final Sacrament</p><p>If the motorcycle is the most honest moment, the yacht is the climax. Sailing Yacht A is not a boat. It’s a navigating installation, piloted by an owner who paid to be invisible and, at the same time, to be recognized by anyone with a pair of binoculars. That’s the kind of paradox only Starck can make architecturally coherent.</p><p><p>And when noise becomes aesthetics, where does beauty end and ugliness begin? 👇</p></p><p>The yacht erases the sea and replaces it with a private set. It turns the captain into a director’s assistant. It makes silence and invisibility the most extreme — and most expensive — ambitions of the project. With Sailing Yacht A and Motor Yacht A, Starck completed his arc: from designer who spoke to the world to designer who builds someone’s world. A world that has nothing to do with democratizing taste and everything to do with privatizing it absolutely.</p><p>The conventional wisdom says design democratizes. Starck, with his superyachts, invented oligarchic design: every detail a polite affront to the rest of the planet. A very good-looking affront, it must be said.</p><p>Devoted or Disenchanted?</p><p>The real question isn’t why someone buys a juicer, a motorcycle, or a yacht designed by Starck. The question is why design has become the most elegant cover for luxury — and why it works so well. Starck is the keeper of a necessary illusion: that taste, if signed correctly, can offset inequality. Or at least make it look less crass.</p><p><p>To make sense of all this, it helps to go back to the man who started it. 👇</p></p><p>Those of us who talk about yachting as culture — and we do it knowingly, with a certain degree of complicity — can’t just glorify the myth. The motorcycle is an icon because it failed. The juicer is an icon because it became a cult object without ever being truly useful. The yacht is an icon because it’s the quietest and most expensive monument to contemporary power.</p><p>If Starck is the prophet of an aesthetic era, it’s up to us to choose: true believers or the disenchanted. Yacht Lounge, by charter, leans toward the latter. But we still admire the hull.</p><p>by Andrea Baracco</p><p><p>Stories like this are the heartbeat of Yacht Lounge. If you value this level of insight, join our 3,800 active readers to receive weekly perspectives you won’t find anywhere else.</p></p><p><p>Here you can find our previous podcast 👇</p></p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://yachtlounge.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">yachtlounge.substack.com</a>
May 13, 2026
Paul Bowles and 9 miles.
<p>In 1931, Gertrude Stein said one word to Paul Bowles: Tangier. Not as advice. As if it were obvious.</p><p>Bowles was twenty-one years old. He boarded a steamship, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar, and never came back.</p><p>9 miles of water. Europe on one side, Africa on the other. The Mediterranean on one side, the Atlantic on the other. You cross it in half an hour by ferry. And yet it is the sharpest border in the world — the light changes, the air changes, the way time moves changes.</p><p>Bowles understood this immediately. Tangier was not a destination. It was a condition. A city that existed at the time in an international free zone, governed by no one in particular.</p><p>Where identities slipped. Where an American could become something else without anyone asking for an explanation.</p><p>He moved there permanently in 1947. With Jane, his wife, also a writer. They lived apart but close, each with their own parallel life. Bound together by that one choice: to stay on the other side.</p><p>Bowles was not a sailor. He had no boats. For him, the sea was not a space to cross with technical skill. It was a space to inhabit with the mind.</p><p>Tangier is a city that faces the sea on three sides. You feel it in the air when the wind shifts.</p><p>You hear it at night — the low sound of waves against the medina. Bowles wrote inside that constant presence. The sea was the background noise of his novels.</p><p><p>“No place is far away. It’s just that the road to get there is different from what you expected.”</p></p><p>His most celebrated novel, The Sheltering Sky, is not a book about the sea. It is a book</p><p>about dissolution. Two Americans crossing the Sahara, losing themselves one by one in a way that has no return. But that dissolution begins here — at the strait — the moment they choose to cross to the other side.Thousands of boats cross the Strait of Gibraltar every year. There is a whole culture of the Atlantic crossing, the rally toward the Caribbean. You plan, you leave, you arrive. The border is a waypoint on the chart plotter.</p><p>Hemingway lived on the sea. Bowles watched it from the shore. Two Americans, two escapes, the same question: what happens when you stop going back? 👇</p><p>Bowles had no chart plotter. He had a suitcase and Gertrude Stein’s word. He crossed the same stretch of water, but differently: with no intention of returning, no arrival port already booked, no idea what he would find on the other side.</p><p>The question he leaves behind is this: when we leave a port, are we really crossing something? Or are we just changing location? There is a difference between navigating and moving. Bowles knew it well.</p><p><p>“Tangier is the only place in the world where I don’t feel like a foreigner. Here I am a foreigner by definition. And that makes me feel at home.”</p></p><p>He died in Tangier in 1999. He was eighty-eight years old. He had never stopped looking at the strait from the window of his apartment overlooking the bay.</p><p>The Strait of Gibraltar is still there. Fourteen kilometres. Some crossings take half an hour. Others take a lifetime.</p><p>by Andrea Baracco</p><p>In Tangier, among the Medina and the Kasbah, the name of Paul Bowles was already there. He wasn’t passing through. He had arrived in 1931 and never left. 👇</p><p>Yacht Lounge grows through word of mouth among curious minds. If this story inspired you, share it with those who navigate your same routes.</p><p>Stories like this are the heartbeat of Yacht Lounge. If you value this level of insight, join our 3,800 active readers to receive weekly perspectives you won’t find anywhere else.</p> <br/><br/>This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://yachtlounge.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1">yachtlounge.substack.com</a>
24 total episodes available
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