DXB

Thirty-five metres of Benetti delivered in 2024, with an interior that is deliberately traditional. That combination is the unusual part: a new yacht is normally an opportunity to be contemporary, and this one was specified in burr walnut instead.

Burr walnut is the material of formal yacht interiors, and it has been for a century. It gives dark, figured, heavily grained panels that read as serious rather than light, and a yacht finished this way in 2024 is making a statement about continuity rather than fashion.

Whether that suits you is worth deciding early. A group that wants pale surfaces and open volumes will find her formal; a group that wants a yacht to feel like a proper interior rather than a gallery will find very little else new that does this.

Ten guests across five cabins, two to a room, dividing evenly. Five couples fit as drawn, and so does a family travelling in pairs. Nothing folds down and no cabin exists merely so the brochure can print the number ten.

Seven crew for ten guests. At thirty-five metres that is a strong complement, close to three crew for every four guests, and it is the figure that tells you most about what a fortnight aboard will actually be like on any given afternoon.

The sun deck carries a jacuzzi. On a yacht of this length that is the top of the boat made into a destination rather than a walkway, and it is where the group ends up in the hour before dinner more reliably than anywhere else aboard.

Being a 2024 delivery, everything is in its first seasons. Nothing has been patched, nothing is tired, and the systems behind the traditional panelling are entirely current. It is the combination of an old-fashioned interior and a new yacht, which is rarer than either on its own.

She works the western Mediterranean, where thirty-five metres is a practical size: small enough for the harbours of the Riviera and the Ligurian coast, large enough for the crossing to Corsica or the run down to Sardinia without the passage becoming the subject of the day.

Take her if you want a new yacht that does not look like one. Nothing else here pairs a 2024 hull with panelling that would have been at home fifty years ago.