A 226ft superyacht and a 20ft dayboat rarely share a designer. In the case of Hoek Design, the Dutch studio celebrating its 40th anniversary this summer, both sit on a CV of 175 designs — and the story of how they got there is one of the more unexpected in sailing.
Founder Andre Hoek, born in Amsterdam in 1955, learned his trade racing traditional Dutch leeboarders: Skutsjes and Lemsteraaks, heavy flat-bottomed working boats that Friesland's elite race hard on narrow canals, sometimes capsizing spectacularly in front of thousands of spectators. Hoek and his brother restored a Skutsje in their early twenties and won national championships in boats they had optimised themselves. He even raced the brutal 'Shit Race', an engineless endurance event recreating the historic manure-and-porcelain trade route between Friesland and south Holland, where crews tow and pole their barges when the wind dies.
That obsession with squeezing speed out of old-fashioned hulls became his signature. After failing to land a job with the big design offices in the 1980s downturn, Hoek started his own studio in his attic in 1986. His first Lemsteraaks, launched in 1987 with gaff rigs analysed through early computer performance models, wind tunnels and Delft tank tests, were almost unbeatable — and fiercely resisted by purists who took a decade to accept that the new boats were lifting the whole class. More than 200 have since been built to Hoek lines.
The breakthrough came with Joss and Kim, 70ft ocean cruisers that looked like elegant 1930s classics above the waterline but hid round-bilge hulls, spade rudders and modern wing keels below. Critics said it couldn't work. Instead it created a genre: the 'modern classic', a boat with vintage grace and contemporary handling. Hoek's studio, based since 1988 in a 16th-century building in Edam — once the heart of Dutch East India Company boatbuilding — went on to produce icons like Athos, Elfje and the 180ft ketch Adele, which cruised Svalbard, the Pacific and Antarctica in her first two years and survived violent storms off Cape Horn. Three J Class yachts also carry the studio's name, alongside the semi-custom Truly Classic series of around 50 boats, one of which won class honours in the 2023 and 2024 Rolex Sydney Hobart races.
For a traveller, the appeal is partly the setting. Edam, a small town on the IJsselmeer north of Amsterdam, is worth a detour for its canals, cheese heritage and maritime history, and the region around it — Volendam, Marken, the sailing waters of the IJsselmeer — remains one of Europe's most characterful cruising grounds. The Skutsje races in Friesland, meanwhile, are a genuinely unique spectacle if your summer travels take you north. Mostly, though, it's a reminder that some of the most beautiful boats afloat come from a small nine-person team working under 16th-century roof beams, one meeting room away from hand-painted wallpaper so rare the only other example hangs in the Rijksmuseum.
Original source: Yachting World
