Comfortina sailboats: a Swedish racing pedigree carried through a 2013 move to Germany
Comfortina's badge has stayed on one continuous line of cruiser-racers even though the company behind it has not stood still. The yard that built the boats started in Sweden, passed through new Swedish ownership and a financial rescue, and then crossed to Germany in a well-documented 2013 transaction that kept the brand, the molds, and even the core model names intact.
Origins and ownership
Comfortina's history begins in Arvika, Sweden, where Kennet Albinson founded the Comfortbåtar AB shipyard in 1964; the yard grew quickly into one of Scandinavia's leading yacht builders. Comfortina boats were built there, in the forests outside Arvika in the Swedish province of Värmland, for nearly five decades — until 2012. In 2011, Jonas Larsson took over Comfortbåtar and continued sailboat production in Arvika with 13 full-time employees, saying at the time that he intended to keep the work there. The yard nonetheless went through a controlled insolvency around 2012, an event from which it was saved.
That rescue proved temporary. On January 1, 2013, COMFORTINA GmbH & Co KG — formed by Niels Töbke, already the owner of Comfort-Yachts Deutschland since 1996 and an experienced boatbuilder and regatta sailor, together with Kiel-based entrepreneur and longtime Comfortina 42 owner Chris de la Motte — acquired the brand's production and distribution rights, along with its molds and plans. Töbke has said Swedish production had become unprofitable because the euro's appreciation against the krona pushed prices up and yields down. In early January 2013 the entire production inventory was trucked from Arvika to Freienohl, Germany, where Comfortina production resumed at SQ Freienohl, a shipyard restarting operations in the former Dehler halls with part of the old Dehler workforce — an arrangement that gave the newly reopened yard its first basic capacity utilization. Comfort-Yachts Deutschland, Töbke's existing business, also runs a service facility in Schleswig with 1,500 square meters of heated hall space and 180 winter and summer berths.
Construction through the eras
The first German-built hulls were two Comfortina 35s, laminated at SQ Freienohl in January 2013 — a changeover YACHT magazine covered under the headline "First Comfortina from Germany." Documented construction detail on the boats themselves is thin, but what survives points to conventional fiberglass building: the Comfortina 35's hull is fiberglass, laid up as a sandwich construction intended to improve the boat's indoor climate, on a fin keel with a bulb. The Comfortina 38's hull and deck are likewise fiberglass, over a lead keel. The Comfortina 42 carried DNV (Det Norske Veritas) classification.
Lines and generations
Comfortina's model line traces back further than the German era suggests. A Swedish-era company site described nine different models developed since the yard's founding, split between an "earlier models" group — the Comfort 26, Comfort 30, and Comfort 32, alongside the Comfortina 32, Comfortina 38, and the Cayenne — and the then-current Comfortina 35, 39, and 42. The Comfortina 38, one of those earlier models, was designed by Thomas Bern, a Swedish naval architect, in the mid-1980s, with fewer than 200 built. Yachting Monthly has described the Comfortina 32 as a cruiser-racer from the 1980s. Comfortina's own Swedish-era site described the newer 35, 39, and 42 as well suited to contemporary racing rules while remaining timeless family boats — a performance-cruiser positioning the brand carried into its German era. After the 2013 move, those same three models continued under the German ownership, now individually equipped and furnished to customer requirements. A larger Comfortina 46 followed at some point during the German era, though it sits outside that core three-model range.
Who Comfortina is for
Comfortina suits buyers drawn to a small, one-line cruiser-racer marque that has kept its model names and three-boat core range intact across a change of country, ownership, and even insolvency — a Scandinavian-designed, now German-built line rather than a rebadged one.
