AMADEA is a Benetti Classic 115 from 1999 that has been comprehensively refitted, most recently in 2023, and she makes a case that a lot of newer yachts cannot. At this price, in this size band, you are usually choosing between space and finish. She declines to make you choose, because the hull was expensive when it was built and the joinery has been maintained rather than replaced.
The interior is Francois Zuretti’s, and it is unashamedly of its period: dark cherry and burr walnut, cream headlinings, brass detailing, deep carpets. Twenty-six years on, that is no longer dated – it is a style with a clear point of view, and it is executed to a standard that would be prohibitive now. The main saloon runs wide across the beam with olive leather armchairs facing cream sofas around a burr table, and a proper bar with stools sits forward of it, next to a dining table set behind timber columns. It feels like a small country house that happens to float.
Accommodation is for ten across five cabins, and the master is the reason to book her. It sits on the upper deck with its own door to the exterior deck, so it functions as a private apartment: wake, open the door, coffee outside before anyone else is up. A walk-in wardrobe and a marble ensuite with a corner tub sit off it. Below, a VIP double under a blue velvet cover, a further double and a twin, all ensuite, plus a convertible lounge with a king sofa bed for a fifth arrangement.
Her outside decks were rebuilt for entertaining. The sun deck carries a jacuzzi under a retractable hard top, so it works in high summer and on a cool evening, with a full outdoor galley – grill, plancha, fridges – immediately aft. The same deck converts to a cinema: a hundred-inch 4K projector drops down against the aft screen with surround sound, and the sun pads become the seating. It is a genuinely good version of a feature most yachts do badly.
At water level she deploys an inflatable sea pool – a netted floor slung inside a floating pontoon frame, with jet ski docks either side and a slide off the upper deck. Children can be in the water all day without anyone standing watch over open sea, which changes the character of a family charter more than any toy list.
Twin Caterpillars give her twelve knots of cruise and eighteen flat out, with a 3,800-mile range and stabilisers underway. Seven crew run her. Her summers are in the Dodecanese out of Rhodes, with winters in the Eastern Mediterranean – she is well placed for the Greek islands and the Turkish coast in a single itinerary, and that corner of the map is one of the few where a yacht can still find an empty bay in August.
Her hull is GRP and semi-displacement, which means she will lift her skirts when the schedule demands it rather than plodding, and the eighteen-knot top end is real rather than theoretical. It is a useful margin to have when the meltemi decides the afternoon.
For 85,000 euros a week she is one of the better-value tri-decks in the Eastern Mediterranean, and the refit means she does not feel like a compromise.
