Floating on Henley-on-Thames, about 35 miles west of London, is an elegant wood-hulled riverboat designed by Frank Stephenson, design director of Britain’s McLaren Automotive best known for his revivals of the bobber-size Mini Cooper and Fiat 500.
The 31-footer, called Riverbreeze, takes her name from her extremely smooth and silent navigation thanks to the electric propulsion sistem. Stephenson, well used to the high-decibel rumbles of powerful cars he designs, wanted a much calmer atmosphere for his personal riverboat.
“When I get on the boat, all I want to hear is the birds and the water” here’s how he wishes his onboard experience to be, chilling in peace with nature, perhaps smoking a pipe or enjoying a drink.
The sleek-lined boat is a classy combination of rosewood and mahogany from Africa and Brazil, laid up with fifteen layers of laquer when it was built and another five every year (which makes a total of 35 coats of protection by now).
The choice of wood Stephenson shares with many other passionate designers, among which Frank Gehry with his Foggy sailboat, is a sort of a romantic one.
“Everyone’s got this white plastic shell, a big boat maybe, but there’s no romance,” he explains. “Wooden boats get better with age, they smell nice, they feel nice, everyone has its own character.”
A sort of rumble seat up front opens via flip-up portals, a bit like the dihedral doors on the Stephenson-designed McLaren 650S and 570S. Up front on the prow there’s a mermaid hood ornament from a 1932 Cadillac, a nod to the designer’s work on land that matches with the theme of times gone by.
Riverbreeze is powered by a “torpedo-shaped” 4.2-kilowatt electric pod motor juiced by eight Varta 12-volt marine batteries that take about eight hours to charge. That adds up to 14.7 kilowatt-hours of storage, enough to get Stephenson and company from his home at Henley-on-Thames to the Cotswolds about ten hours away, and back. Charging points all along the river mean he doesn’t need to sweat range, though. Plus, the benefit to traveling on a river is that at least one direction could be simply floating, if necessary.
The state of the global yachting market presented at Borsa Italiana in Milan
Silvia Chiarito
May 27, 2026
The global yachting market may be slowing, but Italy’s boatbuilding industry continues to outperform, driven by the superyacht and premium segments. That was the key takeaway from the fourth edition of The State of the Art of the Global Yachting Market, the report produced by Deloitte and Edison Foundation in collaboration with Confindustria Nautica and presented in Milan at the headquarters of Borsa Italiana.
