Golden Yachts delivered O’Madeleine on 15 July 2025 — a 60-metre motor yacht built at the group’s own facilities at Perama, on the western edge of Piraeus. She was commissioned in 2022, with construction beginning the following year. Her exterior is the work of Studio Vafiadis; her interiors are divided between Massari Design Studio, which set the tone in the main and upper saloons, and Studio Vafiadis, which drew the guest cabins and the bridge. She carries 12 guests in 7 staterooms and a crew of 15, measures 11 metres in the beam, and made her public debut at the Monaco Yacht Show in September 2025.

The yard at Perama

Golden Yachts was established in 1996 by Paris Dragnis, an offshoot of a Greek shipping house now in its second generation of owners. O’Madeleine is the smallest hull the Perama facility has produced; the order book runs the other way, to the 95-metre O’Pari in 2020 and the 88-metre Project X in 2022.

Set against those, 60 metres reads almost restrained. But the measure of a yard is not the longest hull it has floated; it is the consistency of what it hands over. Perama is a working shipbuilding coast, a stretch of slipways and cranes on the far side of the port that most visitors to Athens never see. That a yacht of this order should be drawn, welded, joined and finished there — rather than ordered from Northern Europe and merely flagged in Greece — is the quiet substance of the news.

The commission

The brief was for freedom, wellness and versatility, and for rooms that could serve more than one purpose. The owner came to the yard wanting 55 metres and was persuaded to build larger. He is a friend of the founding family, younger than the yard’s usual commission, and brought with him an affinity for northern climes that met the Mediterranean instincts of the people drawing her — which is why a yacht built a few kilometres from the Saronic Gulf reads, below decks, as though it were assembled somewhere considerably further north.

Aboard

The interiors are Nordic in temper: natural oak, cured stone, Carrara marble, leather, silk and stingray. Alessandro Massari’s hand shows in the dining table, a single sculpted leg carrying a surface of agate lit from within, cut and joined with resin by an Italian artisan. A staircase of cantilevered steps wraps a glass lift, and does the work a grand stair does in a house on land.

The upper deck carries a marble-clad bar conceived as a stone cave. Below it, the owner’s cabin runs the full beam of the main deck and merges a private lounge and a workspace behind panoramic glazing. The pool is framed in glass, sheltered by glass windbreaks, so that the water is held to the horizon rather than sunk into the deck. Behind the folding transom, the beach club opens to the sea with a hammam, a bar and a lounge, and a garage finished to the same standard, where a wooden screen unfolds to make a massage room. The top deck converts between a gym, a cinema and a room for company, according to what the day asks.

Studio Vafiadis’s exterior is the argument for all of it — long lines cut longitudinally and opened up with glazing, so that the volume is dismantled by eye rather than piled up. It is a shape that reads lighter than 60 metres from the water, which is the harder thing to achieve.

What she signals

Greece has long been a maritime country in the commercial sense — Golden Yachts itself grew out of a shipping house, and its owners remain in that trade — without that authority translating cleanly into the building of yachts at the top of the market. O’Madeleine belongs to the correction of that. She is a Greek-built vessel standing beside Northern European work on engineering, finish and idea, delivered by a yard that has spent the years since 1996 growing into the capability rather than announcing it.

For the client considering a Greek summer, the practical consequence is that the fleet lying off Mykonos and the Peloponnese now includes hulls whose provenance is a half-hour drive from Athens. There is a pleasure in that particular symmetry: to take the Cyclades aboard something that was made within sight of them.

The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.