Most 37-metre motor yachts are asked to look expensive. AURELIA was asked to look fast, and Omega Architects gave her the profile to carry it off, a long, raked deckhouse over an aluminium hull painted in pale blue with a single orange stripe and a racing roundel on the flank. It is Gulf livery, borrowed from Le Mans, and on the Riviera she is recognised from a mile off. That is not a small thing on a coast where every third yacht is white.
The performance is real, not decorative. Twin MTUs push her to thirty knots, and at sixteen she still crosses from Antibes to Saint-Tropez before lunch is cleared. Heesen built her in aluminium in 2011 and she has been refitted four times since, 2017, 2019, 2023 and again in 2025, which is an unusual amount of reinvestment for a boat of this size and shows in the condition of the joinery.
Inside, Bannenberg & Rowell worked in a much quieter register than the exterior suggests. Dark macassar, cream leather and a hexagonal wool carpet run through every space, with the owner’s collection of equestrian and motorsport art doing most of the talking. The main salon sits amidships with green armchairs and a parquet sole; forward of it a formal table seats eight under a run of shelved glassware. A second, rounder table sits in a bay of panoramic windows, the better room for a long lunch, and the one where you notice how much glass Heesen managed to work into the sides.
Eight guests sleep in four cabins. The master takes the full width of its deck with a seating corner, a desk run beneath a pair of sea windows and a marble bathroom with a walk-in shower behind etched glass. Two doubles and a twin lie below, each with portholes at pillow height and its own piece of the owner’s car photography above the bed. It is a coherent, personal interior rather than a specified one.
Outside is where she earns her keep in the Mediterranean. The foredeck converts to a sunken lounge with a circular table, which at dusk with the deck lighting on is the best seat on the boat. The upper deck carries a second table under umbrellas; the sundeck is given over to pads and towels. And off the transom she launches a full-height inflatable slide from the upper deck into the water, rare on a yacht this size, and the reason her tender garage photographs are always full of people rather than equipment.
She cruises the Western Mediterranean year-round, working the stretch between the French Riviera and the Italian coast, with the Amalfi Coast, Corsica and Sardinia all inside comfortable range. Six crew look after eight guests.
AURELIA is for charterers who want to move. She is quick, she is short-handed enough to slip into small harbours, she is instantly identifiable, and she has been kept by an owner who evidently enjoys her. If the brief is a fast, characterful week between Monaco and Portofino rather than a static one at anchor, there is very little else at this length that reads the same way.
