When two special minds come together something rather decent usually comes of it. So when Steve Jobs and Phillippe Starck, the renowned French designer, decided to build a superyacht together it wasn’t going to be a half-arsed job.
After an initial hiccup, when Starck’s secretary refused to put Jobs through as she didn’t recognise his name and was loathe to disturb her boss, they finally met in 2007 and after a brief chat the plan was hatched.
Between 2007 and 2011, when Jobs would pass away, Starck and his wife travelled to Palo Alto and over a series of twelve-hour sessions they designed the yacht that would come to be known as “Venus”. Whilst Jobs’ eccentric ways have been well documented, Starck observed his host’s single-minded approach first hand, reported in Vanity Fair:
“A large window hung above the space where we used to work,” recalls Starck. “We were literally cooking. From time to time Laurene would look in, “Have you offered them something to drink?” He would then return with a glass of water. There was never any food in his kitchen. Other than once when we ate together.”
Starck says that over the years the two, along with their wives, established a genuine friendship despite Steve’s generally introverted nature. Their work, which they have both individually claimed greater credit for, created something unique:
There will never again be a boat of that quality again. Because never again will two madmen come together to accomplish such a task. There’ll never again be so much creativity, rigor, and above all philosophy, applied to a material creation. It was not a yacht that Steve and I were constructing, we were embarked on a philosophical action, implemented according to a quasi-religious process. We formed a single brain with four lobes.
“Venus” is a 256-foot superyacht modelled on the slim, sleeker lines made famous by the range of Apple products. The yacht is said to contain six bedrooms and a complex home-automation system, although pictures of the interior have never been made public.
There is something you have to respect about that, really. After all, a man’s 256-foot superyacht really is his castle.
Read the full story at Vanity Fair and find a few pics on Business Insider.
