Senses was the flagship Fr. Schweers built for itself, and 27 years on she is still one of the more interesting explorers on the charter market. The reason is not the hull, good as it is — steel, 59.22 metres, 993 gross tonnes and a genuine 7,485-mile range on 147,600 litres of fuel. It is what happened inside it. Philippe Starck styled her interior, and the result is a yacht that looks like a working ship from the outside and nothing like one within.
Start with the observation lounge. It wraps the forward superstructure in glass and faces over the bow, low white seating following the curve, a shelf of books and collected objects running beneath the sill. Under way it is the best room aboard. Behind it, the main saloon opens through folding doors to the deck: a round timber dining table, chairs in blush and sea green, orchids, a floor lamp reading over the sofa. Informal, light, and entirely unlike the dark panelling that dates most yachts of her generation.
A separate library lounge sits deeper in the accommodation, lined with books and hung with photography over a Moroccan rug. Portholes rather than picture windows, deep white armchairs, a black rocker in the light. It is the room that gives the game away: somebody thought carefully about where people go when they want to be left alone, which is a question most designers of this era did not ask.
Twelve guests are carried in six cabins. The master runs warmer than the public spaces — timber ceiling, grey headboard, dark floor — with a sitting area to one side; the VIP takes a check headboard and a desk under the view ports; twins sleep two under a run of ports with reading lights on articulated arms. Sixteen crew look after them, a ratio that belongs to a much larger yacht.
On deck she is set up for actually going places. A full jacuzzi sits in the teak with an open shower alongside. The covered aft deck runs the full beam with dining forward and day beds aft, open on three sides so the trade wind goes straight through. Tenders ride on davits where they can be launched fast, and the toy list runs to dive gear, foils, jet skis, kite gear and an inflatable aqua park — the inventory of a yacht that anchors off empty islands rather than stern-to in marinas.
She charters the South Pacific and Australasia, which is exactly the right water for her. That cruising ground rewards range, tender capacity and crew depth more than it rewards marble, and Senses has all three. For a party of twelve who want to go somewhere genuinely remote without giving up a Starck interior and sixteen crew, she is an unusual and well-priced proposition at $350,000 a week.
The practical detail is worth stating plainly. She was built to a commercial standard in 1999 and maintained to one since; the machinery space, the tender handling and the crew accommodation are all sized for extended operation rather than a season of marina hops. That is what makes the itinerary possible. A yacht can look like an explorer without being one. Senses has the range, the crew depth and the deck equipment to leave the charted route and stay away, which is a shorter list of yachts than the marketing would suggest.
