Royal Hakvoort builds about one yacht at a time, and it shows. TOP FIVE II was delivered in 2021 as Project Sidney, hull 251, and she arrived carrying two things that are difficult to retrofit: an ice-class reinforced hull and ceiling heights of 2.4 metres across both her main and owner’s decks.
Those numbers sound technical. Aboard, they are the whole experience. Volume of that kind changes the way light behaves – rooms feel open rather than efficient, and windows run tall enough to put the horizon at eye level from a sofa. Sinot Yacht Architecture drew the interior; Diana Yacht Design handled the naval architecture. The result is a 61-metre that never feels like it is working to seem larger than it is.
The main saloon runs the full beam, a long sectional and low tufted ottomans reaching forward to a bar with high stools under a linear chandelier. Dark timber, pale upholstery, and glass on both sides. Forward and down, the formal dining room is a genuinely separate space – panelled, intimate and set for twelve, the kind of room that makes a long dinner feel deliberate rather than obligatory. Deeper inside she carries a cinema lounge with tiered seating facing a full-width screen, and a dedicated massage room with a treatment table and sea light.
Outside is where the yacht announces its ambitions. The sun deck holds a rectangular swimming pool – a real pool, with a swim-up bar and umbrellas overhead – and, quite separately, a circular spa on the shaded deck below, its jets running against a backdrop of green volcanic ridge. Elsewhere there is a shaded deck lounge under a glass skylight, a fire-pit seating circle for the evening, an indoor-outdoor gym with cardio equipment facing the water, and a beach club at sea level with the toy fleet fanned out on the platform.
Accommodation runs to seven cabins for twelve guests. The owner’s suite takes a full-beam position wrapped in glass, an oval skylight set into the deckhead and a king berth facing the sea on three sides – one of the more convincing owner’s rooms at this length. Guest cabins are individually finished rather than mirrored: pale timber and navy, or dark lacquer walls with framed artwork, each with its own ensuite and each with proper daylight through oversized ports.
Nineteen crew look after twelve guests. That ratio is unusual even in this bracket, and it is the reason a yacht with an elevator, a cinema, a pool, a spa, a gym and a beach club can run all of them at once without anything feeling thin.
She cruises at 12 knots and tops out at 14.5, with a range built for long passages rather than short hops – the ice-class hull is not decoration. Her season runs the Caribbean and the Florida coast, and her photography from St Lucia gives a fair sense of what she was built to do: sit still in a beautiful place, for as long as you want.
What she is not is a yacht that shouts. Hakvoort has never built that way, and Sinot’s interior is a study in restraint – warm timber, woven textiles, low furniture and very little that asks to be noticed. The confidence is in the proportions and in the finish, both of which reward a second week aboard rather than a first afternoon.
