Benetti built the original Motopanfilo in the 1960s. When the yard revived the name sixty years later, KOJU was the first hull out of the shed, and she is the reason the line landed as well as it did. Francesco Struglia drew the exterior with Benetti; Lazzarini Pickering Architetti did the inside. Between them they produced something that looks backwards and forwards at once, and almost nothing else on the charter market at 37 metres reads like her.
The headline is on the bow. KOJU carries a proper swimming pool set into the foredeck, not a jacuzzi wedged into a sunpad, with teak run around it and a lounge immediately aft. On a 37-metre hull that is a serious use of the best real estate aboard, and it changes how the yacht is used: the foredeck becomes the morning deck rather than a place nobody goes.
Inside, the 1960s reference is in the details rather than the pastiche. Warm timber ceilings curve into the joinery instead of meeting it at a corner. Oval portholes punctuate the salon walls. The main salon runs on low cream seating around a navy circular rug, opening aft through full-height glass to the cockpit, and forward past a bulkhead to a dining room where a marble table sits beneath a single large canvas. It is bright, low-slung and unmistakably Italian, and the curved geometry keeps it from feeling like a corridor with furniture in it.
The master takes the full beam of the main deck forward, with windows down both sides at bed height and a settee under the glass. Four further cabins sit below for ten guests in total, looked after by a crew of eight.
Her best small idea is the observation deck: a cocoon of a space, a single round timber table wrapped in curved glass and shaded by the deck above, tucked beside the stair. It is the spot for the first coffee and the last drink, and it is the sort of room that only exists when someone has thought about how a day aboard actually runs.
Aft, the arrangement is worked out with the same care. The main salon opens straight onto the cockpit through full-height glass, so the two run together as one space in the evening, and below that the beach club unfolds at water level under a retractable canopy – shade for those who want it, sun a metre away for those who do not. It is a small yacht’s answer to a big yacht’s problem: how to give ten people somewhere to be that is neither the salon nor a sunpad.
She charters the Bahamas and the Caribbean, and the toy programme is built for exactly that. A FunAir sea pool and floating dock deploy off the transom with an inflatable golf green alongside; two Yamaha jet skis, two Seabobs, two Lift eFoils, kayaks, paddleboards, a flyboard and a waterslide follow. A 35-foot Intrepid runs as the towed tender, rigged for trolling and deep-drop fishing rather than shuttling.
Underneath the styling she is a straightforward, well-mannered boat: GRP, twin MANs, 16 knots flat out and 13 at cruise, with stabilisers that work underway and at anchor. She is not fast and does not pretend to be.
KOJU is a design-led charter yacht in a segment that mostly is not. For a party of ten who care what a room looks like at six in the evening, that is the whole argument.
