The Monaco Yacht Show 2025 opened on Wednesday, 24 September, with an early morning dedicated to vision and collaboration. At 8:30 a.m., Espen Øino Labs welcomed designers and industry leaders to its Monaco headquarters for the Designers’ Taskforce Breakfast, organised in partnership with the Water Revolution Foundation.
The breakfast set the tone for the week: a conversation about innovation in yacht design while embedding sustainability as a core value of the industry. More than a trend, sustainability was presented as something intrinsic to the future of yachting, with a call to reframe the narrative around it, making sure it becomes woven into the value of design, construction, and materials themselves.
Robert van Tol, Executive Director of the Water Revolution Foundation, underlined the importance of starting the show with a united front: “Coming together allows us to re-align and kick off the year with clear objectives and a concrete vision to actualise projects. Collaboration is the only way to accelerate meaningful change and ensure sustainability is fully embedded in every aspect of yacht design and production.”
Espen Øino, whose Monaco-based studio is recognised globally for its naval architecture, yacht design, and broad design expertise, set the stage for this dialogue. His office provided the backdrop for designers and industry visionaries to exchange ideas on how to collectively drive the Roadmap to 2050 design targets in the coming months.
Interiors: the next sustainability frontier
The industry’s sustainability narrative has so far focused heavily on propulsion and emissions during the operational phase, which typically accounts for 90-95% of a yacht’s carbon footprint. Yet this figure excludes the impact of interior maintenance, refit cycles, and non-marine supply chains. A lack of data on materials’ embodied carbon, sourcing, and toxicity perpetuates a culture of aesthetic-first decision-making.
Yacht interiors involve complex supply chains, high-impact materials, and frequent replacements during refits. As a result, they play a decisive role in a vessel’s total embodied carbon and waste output.
Recognising this, the breakfast saw the introduction of the Smart Interiors Horizon (SIH) committee, operating under the Water Revolution Foundation’s three-year programme. SIH’s mission is clear: to move the industry beyond compliance or box-ticking exercises and toward embedding sustainability as a smart, strategic advantage.
From process to material to mindset, sustainability must become an embedded framework for long-term value. A call was made for a mindset shift from reactive measures to regenerative design thinking, and for sustainability to be reframed as a collective opportunity, not an individual challenge.
Two forces make interiors urgent. First, regulatory pressure: frameworks such as the CSRD, EUDR, and IMO’s decarbonisation pathway will increasingly require transparency and data on all yacht components, including interiors. Second, market demand: a new generation of UHNWIs, especially Millennials and Gen Z, expect sustainability to be seamlessly embedded in their luxury experiences.
For these future yacht owners, sustainability exists as a prerequisite for trust and luxury itself. Ignoring interiors risks reputational damage, compliance gaps, and lost market share. Addressing them, on the other hand, offers clear advantages: differentiation, smoother project approvals, and the ability to present a credible ESG strategy to clients and stakeholders alike.
That’s why SIH aims to make change happen, delivering concrete results that can onboard the wider industry and build momentum for transformation.
Rebecca Gabbi