Giorgio Cassetta believes that a yacht should be tailored to the owner’s desires like a perfect bespoke suit
As Giorgio said in one of his interviews, he had adored boats all his life: “I used to love drawing boats, ships and anything that floated when I was two or three. I decided to turn that passion into my profession”.
On getting his degree in Design-Transport and Product Design from Rome’s Sapienza University, he easily got a job at a yacht design studio, and not one. But with time, he realized that the projects that he worked on became famous under other people’s names, while he remained unknown.
So, in 2012 Cassetta put together a portfolio of his works with a 90-metre concept on its cover and started showing them to everybody. Soon this file ended up on the late Paolo Vitelli’s desk – a businessman, a visionary, founder of the Azimut brand and the Azimut–Benetti group, a legend of Italian shipbuilding, who passed away in December 2024. He could immediately recognize the young designer’s potential and gave him the order for the first Benetti. Feeling inspired, Cassetta finally registered his own studio and set to work.
He started with designing rather compact serial yachts like the Mediterraneo (his debut was the first unit in the Mediterraneo 116′ series launched in 2016), the Delfino and the Diamond, and later moved on to larger vessels. With an increase in the boats’ size, his career went up, too.
Today there are 15 employees in Cassetta Yacht Designers with headquarters in Rome. The yacht creation process comprises all aspects of design, from preliminary studies and 3D modelling to engineering and architectural solutions. Not long ago the studio started working on interiors, too, as Giorgio Cassetta attracted his mother, residential designer Leticia Perez.
The number of projects in his portfolio has exceeded 400, and the list of shipyards he has collaborated with keeps growing: Cantiere delle Marche, Cigarette Yacht, Lürssen, Tankoa, Venture Yachts. But his main partner is still Benetti. Their collaboration does not only bring pleasure to both parties, but also numerous professional prizes. Take the 70-meter Spectre with her six (!) awards, or the brilliant Luminosity (107.6 m), the Metis (63 m) or the B.Century star family with a size range of 55-75 m.
In Giorgio Cassetta’s opinion, yacht designers should not be “self-absorbed artists but artisans working to serve the product”. For this reason, his style features superclean lines, no excessive embellishments and timelessness, which makes it almost impossible to refer his yachts to a particular time period.
Benetti shipyard characterizes Cassetta Yacht Designers in the following way: “The studio has become synonymous with design perfection, technical expertise, and confidentiality – traits highly valued by the industry’s most notable clients”.
Giorgio keeps repeating that to him yacht design means melding the cultures of the three stakeholders involved in creating any yacht: the owner, the yard and the yacht designer. And judging by the number of projects in his studio’s pipeline, this approach does work.
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