Beyond Speed: Designing Space, Comfort and Connection with the Sea
Francesco Paszkowski on the Philosophy Behind Baglietto FAST50
By Olivia Matsumoto
At the 2026 Monaco Yacht Show, Baglietto presented the first FAST50 as a world premiere. The 49.9-metre, all-aluminium yacht sits just below 500 GT, cruises at 24 knots and reaches 30 knots. Exterior and interior design are by Francesco Paszkowski Design, with Margherita Casprini collaborating on the interiors and Pier Luigi Ausonio responsible for naval architecture. Those numbers explain the yacht as an object of performance; they do not explain what it feels like to move through it.
On board, the more interesting story is one of controlled opposites. FAST50 is sharp and assertive from the dock, yet unexpectedly calm inside. It is engineered for speed, yet organised around slow acts: conversation, shade, dining outdoors, watching the horizon and moving between interior and sea. In an interview aboard the yacht, Francesco Paszkowski traced that tension through more than three decades of work with Baglietto, his long collaboration with Margherita Casprini, and an influence he spoke about with particular intensity: Japan.
Two characters in one yacht
FAST50 announces speed before the engines start. Its low profile and taut exterior lines are deliberately forceful, while the interior moves in the opposite direction. Greys and whites are warmed by brown accents; broad upholstered surfaces soften the geometry; full-height glazing draws daylight deep into the main salon. Paszkowski describes the shared philosophy of his studio and Margherita Casprini as "modern, but not minimalistic - modern contemporary." The distinction is important. The interior is intended to feel current without becoming austere.
Paszkowski and Casprini have worked together for around twenty years, but their responsibilities are not identical. As he explained during the interview, Casprini works closely with clients on fabrics, upholstery, curtains and many of the tactile selections that determine atmosphere, while he concentrates on layout, spatial relationships, architectural lines and details such as the shelving and vertical rhythms of the salon. The refinement of FAST50 comes less from a single decorative gesture than from this calibration between structure, colour, texture and proportion.
The katana as a design reference
When asked how he connected the yacht's aggressive exterior with its calmer interior, Paszkowski immediately moved beyond conventional yachting references. "You have to know that I love Japan," he said. His point of reference for the exterior is the katana. For him, the Japanese sword represents power, precision and history - qualities he associates with a shipyard whose own history reaches back to 1854. The influence is not literal. There is no attempt to reproduce a Japanese motif; instead, the katana becomes a way of thinking about tension in a line and about strength held under control.
His relationship with Japanese aesthetics also contains the opposite quality. "Soft, for me, is something that I have learned from Japanese culture," he said, describing a harmony between objects, space and the people inside it. He spoke about dark tones set against red, the discipline of Japanese objects and an original piece of samurai armour kept in his Florence office, whose helmet he particularly admires. In FAST50, those ideas appear not as quotations from Japan but as a balance: sharpness outside, softness inside; power without heaviness; history translated into contemporary form.
An Italian style that has to travel
Paszkowski is proud to work within the tradition of Italian design, but he is equally clear that contemporary Italian style cannot depend on a closed set of national visual codes. "Italian style today must be contemporary all over the world," he said. For a superyacht, the question is practical as well as philosophical: the yacht may be conceived in Italy, but it must make sense to owners whose references, habits and expectations come from many different cultures.
That international perspective has been built over a long career. Paszkowski opened his Florence studio in 1990 after earlier experience with Spadolini Design and periods working between Athens and Singapore. His first 29-metre open yacht for Baglietto dates to 1992, and the studio has since also worked with some of the world’s most prominent and well-established shipyards. He told GEN DE ART that he has never counted his projects carefully, estimating only that the total is certainly above one hundred. More important to him is the principle that experience should widen a designer's vocabulary rather than harden it into a formula.
Courtesy at Baglietto
When the sea became part of the interior
The strongest architectural theme in the interview was not speed but the sea itself. Paszkowski recalled that when he began designing yachts, the dominant approach often treated the interior as a protected world with very little visual or physical relationship to the water. "You had a boat in the middle of the sea without any connection," he said. By the mid-2000s, he was already working with balconies, larger openings and full-height glazing to reverse that condition, an approach that has since become central to contemporary yacht design.
FAST50 develops that idea on several levels. The main salon uses floor-to-ceiling glass to extend sightlines beyond the hull. On the upper deck, sliding glass panels allow the salon to open on three sides, transforming an enclosed room into something closer to a veranda. At the stern, a fold-down bulwark enlarges the beach area and brings the water physically closer. Paszkowski also stressed that openness must now be designed together with shade and airflow. With stronger sun exposure, a successful outdoor space is not simply uncovered; it must give guests fresh air and a clear relationship with nature while still protecting them from heat. The architecture therefore mediates between exposure and shelter rather than choosing one over the other.
Courtesy at Baglietto
From speed alone to speed, comfort and connection
Baglietto's relationship with high-performance yachts is part of the shipyard's history. Its 26-metre Chato, launched in 1988, reached a top speed of 60 knots. Paszkowski used that earlier generation to describe how the design problem has changed. In the past, he said, the challenge could be speed itself. Today, a fast yacht must resolve three demands simultaneously: speed, comfort and connection with the sea.
FAST50 is built around that more complex equation. The yacht carries the performance expected of a planing aluminium hull, but it also has a nine-metre beam, a full-beam owner's suite, four additional guest cabins and substantial exterior areas, including a sun deck that would once have been unusual on a yacht of this profile. During the onboard tour, the contradiction became tangible: a yacht capable of 30 knots still provides the spatial generosity, privacy and circulation expected from a contemporary 50-metre vessel. Performance remains visible in the silhouette; comfort is built into the way the yacht is inhabited.
Luxury is also a question of proportion
One of the most revealing details was the absence of a formal dining table in the main salon. Instead, the room is given over to large sofas and conversation. Paszkowski connected that decision to a broader change in the scale of contemporary furniture: deeper, more generous seating requires more architectural volume around it. Once comfort changes the dimensions of the furniture, the old salon-and-dining formula no longer produces the same balance. On FAST50, dining is moved outward, where food, breeze, view and shade become part of the experience.
The same attention to use continues behind the visible rooms. A concealed crew passage behind artwork on the lower deck connects service and technical areas without interrupting guest circulation. The pantry is linked by a dumbwaiter to the decks above; the galley has extensive storage; wine can be kept in dedicated cellars. These details are not intended to dominate photographs, yet they reveal the difference between styling a yacht and designing a functioning environment. Luxury depends on what guests see, but also on how efficiently everything they do not see has been resolved.
"Baglietto is part of my heart"
Paszkowski's relationship with Baglietto is unusually long. The collaboration began in 1992, and more than three decades later he no longer describes it simply as a professional association. "Baglietto is part of my heart," he said. That familiarity can make communication between designer and shipyard more intuitive, but it also creates a harder challenge: how to preserve continuity without repeating a successful language until it becomes mannerism.
His answer is deliberately unsentimental. "Every time a new project is a new starting," he said. He values earlier projects as experience, not as templates. "We never stop to learn. I'm still learning." He added, with characteristic lightness, that he continues to design new things partly to discover whether he is "still young or not." The line sounds playful, but it reveals a serious discipline: longevity in design depends not only on recognition, but on the ability to remain receptive.
The detail he would not choose
At the end of the interview, Paszkowski was asked to identify the single detail on FAST50 that best represented his design philosophy. He declined to choose one. The answer was not evasive; it was consistent with everything he had said before. If every project is a new beginning, then no recurring curve, material or decorative signature should be allowed to stand in for the whole design.
That refusal gives FAST50 a more interesting place within his work. The yacht is recognisably shaped by decades of experience, yet it is not presented as a summary of the past. Its exterior compresses speed and history into a taut profile; its interior opens toward light, comfort and the sea; its details quietly manage the service and movement required by real life on board. The katana was Paszkowski's reference for force and lineage, while Japanese culture also taught him softness and harmony. Between those two ideas lies the most precise definition he offered of contemporary luxury: not an accumulation of objects, but a carefully controlled relationship between people, space, nature and movement.
