Indigo Star

Thirty-eight metres built by Siar & Moschini, and the interior is the reason to look at her. Where most yachts of this length have been opening up their volumes for twenty years, she keeps separate rooms with timber joinery between them, which is now the unusual choice.

The difference shows up after a few days rather than on arrival. An open-plan yacht puts everybody in the same space whether they want to be there or not; a yacht with rooms lets ten people be aboard at the same time without being in each other's company all of it.

The joinery is real timber and it is the thing that dates an interior most slowly. Stone and lacquer surfaces are of their decade in a way that fitted wood is not, and a yacht from 2012 built this way still reads as considered rather than as evidently of its period.

Ten guests across five cabins, two to a room, dividing evenly. Five couples fit the layout as drawn, and so does a family travelling in pairs. There is no odd berth to allocate and no cabin that somebody has to be persuaded to accept.

Seven crew for ten guests. It is a generous complement at thirty-eight metres, and it is the number that describes a week more reliably than the length does: enough hands that nothing waits its turn on any afternoon of the charter.

The aft deck is laid for dinner for ten and it is sheltered. That second word matters more than the first: a covered aft deck is usable in the evening breeze and after a passing shower, which is when a formal interior dining room otherwise wins by default.

She was delivered in 2012, which puts more than a decade of seasons behind her. The systems are proven, the crew know her habits, and nothing about the yacht is still waiting to reveal itself during somebody's fortnight.

She is available across the Mediterranean. Take her if you are ten and you would rather the yacht felt like a well-made house than like an open-plan lobby, and if the appeal of a boat is being able to close a door behind you.