Super-rich pledge £20bn for Germans to float their boats

GERMANY has overtaken its closest global competitors to become the unrivalled builders of super-yachts for the world's rich.

• Dusseldorf boatshow attracts the super-rich. Picture: Getty

The super-rich used to make for Rotterdam and Amsterdam in the Netherlands, or a number of shipbuilders on Italy's Adriatic, if they wanted floating status symbols to flaunt.

Now it is the sturdy port cities on the German North Sea coast attracting these buyers - so much so that Vanity Fair, the magazine which chronicles glamour and riches, recently placed Bremen alongside Aspen in Colorado and St Martin in the Caribbean as a place where the super-rich simply have to be seen.

That's because the Lrssen yard there is where dreams are built, on the slipways above the North Sea's grey, cold waters. There and at Hamburg, Lbeck and other ports, yachts costing 1 million a metre are made to fuel the demand of a very few with lots of money to burn.

The Saudi royal family commission yachts in Germany; so does that of Abu Dhabi. People such as Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich, Microsoft's Paul Allen, Libyan president Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam, American software billionaire Larry Ellison, and a host of people so rich only their bankers know their true wealth, flock to these maritime towns for the last word in ocean-going opulence.

It is not only the excellence of the shipbuilding itself; it is the little extras Germany has managed to master in such a short time that attracts them.

Extras such as pure silk carpeting that costs 2,000 for each square metre, papaya bark decking at 3,000 a foot (complete with 15 coats of varnish) and on-board furniture made from the hides of manta rays.

Forget helicopter landing pads - they are so common now that shipbuilders include them with the porthole specs. The real money lies in the extras.

"A yacht is and remains a status symbol," German boat designer Joachim Kinder told news magazine Der Spiegel as the Dsseldorf boat fair got under way this week. "The sheer cost of buying and maintaining such vessels creates a kind of class envy and leads to criticism of supposed decadence."

Michael Breman, head of sales at the Lrssen yard, said; "Never in history has so much money been available." He should know - boats in his yard start at around 50m, with many selling for ten times that. Often the client's demands are themselves just as exorbitant. One tycoon insisted on a snow-making machine the size of a walk-in freezer so he could have snowball fights when moored in the tropics.

The Abramovich yacht Eclipse - launched last year and which cost an estimated 800m - boasts the largest onboard private swimming pool in the world which can also be converted into a dancefloor. Other features include a wellness centre (with fitness studio) a hairdresser, massage parlour, sauna, steam bath and whirlpool. The master suite furniture is covered in green-dyed sting ray skin, and each Dornbracht rainshower in its numerous bedrooms cost 17,000 a time. Even the taps in its 51 sinks cost more than 1m.

Another unnamed Russian oligarch paid close to 1.5m for a copy of the Sistine Chapel's Michelangelo ceiling on his Bloehm & Voss-made yacht's dining-room ceiling, complete with gold-leaf detail.

The German designer of Abramovich's yacht also revealed another rich Russian has put in a request for his yacht to have showers that can spray water and champagne to order.

"We're working on it, it's doable," said the designer. "We just have to work out whether he wants the champagne chilled or warm."

German yards have full order books for yachts worth around 20 billion and, it seems, the market remains buoyant.