Most 41-metre motor yachts are decorated. RUYA was designed. Sam Sorgiovanni took the interior in a direction almost nobody else in this size bracket would risk, drawing on the colours and textures of the Australian outback: burnt reds, ochres, dark timber and stone, warm rather than pale, grounded rather than glossy. It is the opposite of the bleached-oak-and-white-leather template that dominates the market, and it is the reason people remember her.
Alia Yachts built her in Antalya and delivered her in 2016, with a refit following in 2021. The hull and superstructure are GRP, and she measures 499 gross tons, which is not an accident. Staying the right side of 500 keeps her in a lighter regulatory class, and the space that discipline costs her on paper she recovers in the way the volume is used.
She is not fast and does not pretend to be. Fourteen knots flat out, ten in normal running. That is a deliberate choice about what kind of week she is for. She is built to move between anchorages at a civilised pace, sit still for long stretches, and burn very little doing it. For the Croatian islands or the stretch between Corsica and Sardinia, where the distances are short and the point is to arrive unhurried, the arithmetic works in her favour.
The master sits on the main deck, forward and full-width, and comes with its own study, a genuinely useful room rather than a desk pushed against a bulkhead. The bathroom runs to stone and dark timber in the same register as the rest of the boat. Below, a double and a twin take the remaining guests, each with a bathroom en suite, bringing her to five cabins for ten. Nine crew is a generous complement at this size, and it shows in how the service runs.
Her social geography is unusually well sorted for 41 metres. The main deck lounge opens aft through full-height glass. Forward of it, the dining area sits in its own defined space rather than sharing the saloon, which matters when ten people eat together every night for a week. One deck up there is a second lounge, quieter and more enclosed, and outside it a shaded dining table for meals in the open. The sun deck carries a proper rectangular plunge pool, shaded by a pair of parasols, with enough uncommitted teak around it to spread out on. At water level a beach club opens onto the swim platform and the toys.
What you are choosing with RUYA is character. Plenty of yachts in this bracket will give you the same cabin count, similar volume and rather more speed. Very few will give you an interior with a genuine point of view, executed by a designer working at the top of his range and kept current by a 2021 refit. She cruises Croatia, Corsica, Sardinia and the French and Italian coasts through the summer at EUR 182,000 per week.
She rewards guests who notice how a room is put together. For anyone else, she is simply a warm, calm and beautifully finished boat with an unusually good crew ratio.
