Comar sailboats: an Italian design house's yard, twice reborn
Comar's story begins with a disguise. In 1961 a Forlì workshop called Sipla built one of Italy's first fiberglass Flying Juniors, but Italian type-approval authority RINA still associated composite hulls with novelty and risk. So the builder painted its glass hull brown, added fake wood grain, and presented it at a shipyard known for classic wooden boats — a ruse that worked. The RINA engineers who signed off on the fiberglass hull, by the company's own account, unknowingly cleared the way for a yard that would build thousands of boats. A decade later, in 1971, Sipla renamed itself Comar and cemented a design partnership with the French naval architect Jean-Marie Finot that would define its first generation.
Origins and ownership
That renaming coincided with Comar's most consequential early design: the Comet 910, drawn jointly by Van de Stadt and a very young Finot. The design was so radical that, on the eve of its launch — already registered for the Middle Sea Race — both men called Sipla to try to disown authorship. It became the line-defining boat of Comar's first era, with almost 1,000 units built over 15 years. By 1989 the Forlì facility covered 43,000 square meters, employed 160 people, and produced 145 boats for a turnover of 25 billion lire; that same year, the Comet 333 was chosen for the first Giro d'Italia a Vela.
Comar changed hands in the mid-1990s, when Massimo and Flavia Guardigli — until then owners of Media Ship, a sailboat-only brokerage — took over a struggling Forlì shipyard. The company they bought had gone bankrupt under its prior owner; the Guardiglis purchased only the brand and molds from the court-appointed administrator and opened a new Comar entity in Forlì. Massimo took charge of new projects and market development, while Flavia ran production and eventually became director of Comar's technical studio. Before the couple's formal takeover, Flavia had already bought the mold for the Genesi 43 and gathered Comar's former artisans to build ten of the boats in a single year — keeping the model alive through the transition. Comar later moved production from Forlì to Fiumicino, on the former Chris-Craft site near Rome, once the yard's growing yacht sizes outgrew Romagna's boatbuilding tradition; the first boat built there was the 65 Blue Spark.
The designers
Beyond Van de Stadt and Finot, Comar's 1980s design roster included Doug Peterson and Andrea Vallicelli, whose studio entered the yard's lineup with the Comet 12 in 1983 — a commercial success that ran past 200 examples within a decade — and later drew the Comet 303. Vallicelli also penned the one-off racer Stradivario, winner of four consecutive editions of the Centomiglia del Garda, and, with Alessandro Nazareth, the aggressive cruiser-racer Comet 51 Sport. Under Guardigli ownership, the Comet 51S — again from Vallicelli and Nazareth — opened a new Sport fleet that eventually grew to eleven models between 21 and 100 feet, organized into Sport, Raised Saloon, and Smart lines. Sergio Lupoli, a Naples-based designer, drew the racing-successful Comet 33 and 36 for Comar and signed the Smart line's one-design opener, the Comet 21 OD, later joined by the 26 and 31. Vallicelli's studio also signed the Raised Saloon series — the 52, 62, 73, 85, and 100 RS — while Bruce Farr designed the Comet 38, 50, and 65, Comar's first Maxi models, launched alongside the Genesis 43. More recently, Marc Lombard designed the C-Cat 37 that opened Comar's catamaran line in 2015, and the C-Cat 65 flagship came from Enrico Contreas and Amadio & Partners, with Naval Design handling structural, FEM, and CFD work alongside Comar's in-house Studio Tecnico — the same team behind the 24-to-30-meter Comet Maxi range announced in 2024 with Amadio & Partners.
Construction through the eras
Comar's own construction page describes the yard as among the first in Italy to build in fiberglass for series production. For the Genesis-generation boats of the 1990s, Comar adopted then-ultramodern thermanto or balsa sandwich construction with vacuum lamination. Its modern build method laminates hulls and decks as a Corecell-core sandwich, using unidirectional and biaxial carbon or glass fabrics set in epoxy-vinyl or epoxy resin, with structural reinforcements bonded directly to the hull rather than pre-formed in counter-molds, for added rigidity. Every hull goes through a 60-degree postcure cycle for lightness and strength. Hull and deck are joined with structural adhesive, pins, and biaxial lamination, and brass plates replace foam core at hardware mounting points for a better bearing surface against steel fasteners. Structural bulkheads are composite or okumè and mahogany marine plywood, veneered in wood; on racing boats they're instead built as a Corecell and glass-or-carbon sandwich, vacuum-compacted over three cycles and postcured. Keels are cast onto a stainless-steel structural cage, with lead-antimony fin and bulb finished in an epoxy coating, and rudders are laminated from unidirectional glass in an epoxy-vinyl matrix — carbon and epoxy resin on racing boats. All onboard steel hardware is Aisi 316L, largely custom-made in Comar's own workshop, a capability that extends to building the 27-meter carbon mast for the C-Cat 65 in-house.
Lines and generations
Comar's 1990s cruising line, introduced before the Guardigli takeover, comprised the 13-meter Genesis 43 and 15-meter Phoenix, both commercially successful. Under the Guardiglis, Comar built out the Sport, Raised Saloon, and Smart monohull lines described above, then, judging that a yard of its size couldn't compete head-to-head with larger builders like Cantiere del Pardo or X-Yachts, opened a catamaran line in 2015 with the C-Cat 37. Growth continued until the 2008 financial crisis — Comar had just sold its first 100-foot yacht, followed by an 85-footer — though Guardigli has said the Italian nautical industry's broader 2008 downturn, which cost the sector some 95 percent of its revenue, didn't reach Comar until 2011. By the time the Comet Maxi range was announced in 2024, the yard was no stranger to that segment, already counting the Comet 100 and 85 RS in its portfolio. Comar sums up its approach with the brand payoff "Hand Made Yachting Technology."
Who Comar is for
Comar suits sailors drawn to a small Italian yard that has kept design and build in-house across two very different eras — a Forlì-built performance-monohull lineage descended from Van de Stadt, Finot, and Vallicelli, and a Fiumicino-built range of Sport, Raised Saloon, Smart, and C-Cat catamaran models built to the yard's modern Corecell-and-carbon construction standard.