Breehorn sailboats: a small Dutch yard built around two design offices
Breehorn is a small Dutch sailboat builder whose lineup owes as much to its design offices as to the yard's own story. Breehorn B.V. builds the range -- the 31, 37, 41, 44 and 48 -- from Woudsend in the Netherlands, but the design credit for the 37 belongs to the family firm D. Koopmans Jachtontwerpers, and the 48's hull carries a separate credit to Simonis Voogd.
Origins and ownership
Breehorn's own account of its operation says it builds each boat in-house, from keel to rigging, which it says keeps it in control of the quality of its processes and materials. That vertical, deliberately small approach is the point: the yard states plainly that growth has never been a goal in itself. The yard builds in fibreglass rather than metal.
The designers
The Breehorn 37, launched in the early 1980s according to a review of the model, is credited to the design office D. Koopmans Jachtontwerpers rather than to a named individual. That office was founded in 1961 by Dick Koopmans Sr., born in 1935, whose first commissions were motorboats before he moved into designing sailing yachts. He designed the centreboard yacht Jantine IV around 1979, which his family sailed to the Azores and Spitsbergen, and he later sailed Jantine V with his wife, Elly, to Patagonia, Antarctica and the Pacific. In the mid-1980s, when his son Dick Koopmans Jr. -- born in 1962 -- graduated from the School for Advanced Technology and began his own career as a yacht designer, the partnership became VOF D. Koopmans Jachtontwerpers. The younger Koopmans is also a racer, twice winner of the Round Britain & Ireland Race and third in the 2009 OSTAR. On the 48, the largest model in the range, Breehorn credits its fast hull to a different office, Simonis Voogd; a review in Zeilen.nl described the boat as pursuing an expansion of classic ideas about seaworthiness, spacious luxury and finish quality.
Who Breehorn is for
Breehorn suits a buyer drawn to a small, hand-built Dutch cruiser with a documented, multi-generational design pedigree behind it -- someone as interested in the Koopmans family's own sailing and racing record as in the boats they drew.
