IN A WORLD DEFINED BY STRUCTURE & ROUTINE, ENVISION A YACHT THAT DEFIES TRADITION…
One that does not dictate experience but rather facilitates it. Where luxury isn’t about excess, but instead revolves around simplicity, informality, and human connection.
byJC, Lawson Robb, and Lateral Naval Architects present HUB, an 83m motor yacht that challenges the established norms of yacht architecture. HUB emerges as a sanctuary of liberation, a haven of freedom from the constraints and repetition of daily life, where luxury is defined by the richness of shared human experiences.
HUB is not a reaction against tradition for its own sake. It is the product of asking straightforward questions and following them where they lead; about structure, about space, about what luxury really means when you strip it back to experience rather than appearance.
Rethinking the Structure
HUB is enabled by Lateral’s Free From Bulkheads (FFB) technical platform. The FFB platform challenges traditional superyacht architecture enabling watertight bulkheads to terminate at the lower deck. Lateral’s philosophy for the platform was to imagine a skateboard. Beneath the deck, all the necessary machinery. Above the deck, anything is possible. The result is an unconstrained lower deck adjacent to the waterline, which gives the potential for greater design innovation in layout and ultimately an elevated user experience.
Philosophy
HUB is a place to be, a nexus of connectivity and expression, a place where individuals come together to celebrate the joys of shared experience. HUB’s design is built around the very environment in which it exists, placing life on the water at the heart of a layout characterized by fluidity and movement, spaces seamlessly blend into one another, fostering an environment of continuous engagement.
The philosophy for both the exterior and interior aims to create a truly holistic yacht, where every element serves multiple purposes and maintains interconnected, symbiotic relationships with one another.
Packaged within a modern yet contemporary exterior design, HUB marries quiet luxury, state-of-the-art technology, and user experience.
Space Organised Around Life, Not Layout
The three decks of HUB each have a distinct character, but they are conceived as parts of a continuous experience rather than separate zones. The lower deck’s Beach-Cave sits at water level, merging a watersports centre with social space and opening the hull sides outward as platforms, a deliberate blurring of the boundary between yacht and sea. The main deck is organised around light and informality, with large areas of glazing and fluid divisions that resist the formality of conventional salon planning. The upper deck offers a sky lounge and outdoor dining without ceremony.
Layouts across all decks are asymmetric, not as a stylistic choice but as a spatial one, creating varied lines of sight, encouraging movement and making the scale of the vessel feel inhabited rather than monumental.
Electric Hybrid: Silent, Locally Emission Free, Compact, Future-Proof
The creative layout of HUB is enabled via an all-electric propulsion and energy system architecture.
Lateral’s Electric Hybrid system incorporates batteries as the primary means of energy delivery, permitting the varying power demands of hotel, propulsion and manoeuvring loads to be seamlessly met. Diesel generators are provided for battery charging and high-speed cruising, selected free from the constraints of a conventional diesel electric and purely on the basis of efficiency and energy density.
The result is an elegant solution with flexibility in space distribution and a compact arrangement that allows the primary machinery space to be accommodated below the lower deck.
The Electric Hybrid architecture permits extensive operation with no noise, lower vibrations and zero local emissions. Married with the creative design solutions enabled by the system, HUB delivers a next generation of on-board experience.
KEY PARTICULARS
Length Overall: 83.3 m
Beam: 13.8 m
Gross Tonnage: 2,500 GT
Propulsion: Electric Hybrid with DC Grid
Top Speed: 16.5 knots
Range: 7,000 nm
Luxury Space: 900 sq.m
