Feeling sailboats: France's lifting-keel cruisers from a family shipyard
Feeling was the sailboat brand of the Kirié shipyard of Les Sables d'Olonne, on France's Atlantic coast - a builder whose defining idea, threaded from its earliest models to its last, was a lifting keel or ballasted centerboard that let a cruising boat draw only a couple of feet with the board raised, opening anchorages a fixed-keel boat couldn't reach. Paired with pricing pitched below the custom-yacht tier, that identity positioned Feeling as an accessible French cruiser - a positioning that outlasted several changes of company ownership before the range itself disappeared.
Origins and ownership
Kirié's roots reach back to the early decades of the twentieth century in Les Sables d'Olonne. One account dates the founding to 1912, when the Kirié family shaped a yard out of a small garage on the rue de la Forêt; another places founder Auguste Kirié's arrival in the town in 1927, after years working shipyards along the Marne and the Seine and then hiring out boats on his own account, when he opened a yard under his own name. Either way, the yard built small wooden pleasure boats at first - its oldest surviving model is a Class C hydroplane dating to 1936 - before the 1950s brought a shift toward powerboats and an early embrace of polyester construction, with Kirié among the first French yards to work in fiberglass. Auguste's son Claude Kirié, born in 1917, joined the yard at 13 and took over its direction in 1942, a role that spared him deportation to Germany during the war. By the 1980s and 1990s, Mers&Bateaux later recalled, Kirié ranked among France's leading boatbuilders; a later-generation family member, Christian Kirié, joined the firm during that period, then part of the MCP group, and created the separate Daytona powerboat range, distinct from the Feeling sailboats.
Kirié launched the Feeling sailboat range in 1980. Its highest-profile seasons followed mid-decade: in 1986 the Feeling 1350 won the Route du Rhum's production-boat category, and the following year the Feeling 1090 was named Boat of the Year. Kirié also bought out its struggling rival Kelt Marine during the 1980s, folding part of Kelt's range into the Feeling name. Ownership of the yard itself then changed hands repeatedly: by 2000, Alliaura Marine had taken over Kirié and continued developing the Feeling range - the Feeling 32 was named Voile Magazine's Sailboat of the Year that same year, and survived across all three of the yard's ownership eras - Kirié, Alliaura, and Privilège Marine. In 2008, Kirié was integrated into Privilège Marine, the high-end catamaran specialist also based in Les Sables d'Olonne. The investment fund Aurelius, also a Hanse Yachts shareholder, took control of Privilège Marine in June 2017 and refocused activity on its catamarans, casting doubt on the Feeling range's future; the range disappeared some time afterward. Hanse Yachts became Privilège Marine's majority shareholder in 2019.
The designers
Philippe Harlé, a prolific French naval architect credited with more than 300 designs from dinghies to ocean racers, drew Kirié's own Feeling 920 and Feeling 226 in the range's non-Kelt design lineage. Philippe Briand designed the Feeling 850, launched in 1984 (one contemporary test gives 1985) and derived from the Free Lance prototype that had won the Half Ton Cup in 1983; it was built in Racing, Club, and Cruising versions before production ended in 1988 after 313 hulls.
A separate design lineage runs through Kelt Marine and architect Gilles Vaton, who had earlier worked at the Mauric design office and for the Pouvreau yard. Vaton designed the Kelt 8.50 for Kelt Marine in 1983 - a different boat from Briand's similarly numbered Feeling 850. After Kirié's takeover of the struggling Kelt yard, that boat was renamed Kelt 29 and then Feeling 29 by the late 1980s, reworked into the Feeling 306 in the mid-to-late 1990s, and then broke with that lineage altogether as the Feeling 30 in 2001. Vaton also designed the Feeling 286 directly for Kirié in 1986, which stayed in the catalog for nearly a decade and sold more than 250 units. Michel Joubert, with interior designer Patrick Roséo, later designed the Feeling 36 (2001); Alain Mortain and Yiannis Mavrikios designed the Feeling 44, and the Harlé & Mortain bureau designed the Feeling 1040/1090 pairing and the early-1990s Feeling 416 Elite. Kirié also built boats under license in Canada, near Québec City, under the Elite brand.
Construction through the eras
Kirié's early polyester expertise carried through the range. The Feeling 396 DI's hull, for instance, is solid glass laid up from chopped-strand mat and woven roving in a polyester resin matrix, with a balsa-cored deck and glassed-in stringers and frames for rigidity. The Feeling 36, from the same era, was built "the old-fashioned way, without structural counter-molds" - single-skin lamination up to 30mm thick at the bottom, a balsa-sandwich deck, and a hull-to-deck joint reinforced by bulkheads resined around their full perimeter, not just at the outer seam. Keel material varied by model and by draft option - lead, iron, or a lifting configuration - and shoal-draft versions typically paired an external cast-iron ballast pan with a lightweight fiberglass lifting foil.
Lines and generations
The shoal-draft idea that defined Feeling began early: the Feeling 720 was one of the first boats built with a ballasted centerboard, cutting draft from 4'3" to 2'3" with the board raised, and the same basic idea carried through decades later to the 396 DI's lifting-keel system. Two similarly numbered but unrelated model families run through the brand's middle years: Briand's 1984 Feeling 850 is a different boat from the Vaton-designed Kelt 8.50 that became the Feeling 29, 306, and 30. On the cruising side, the Feeling 1090 (1987) shares its hull with the earlier Feeling 1040, adding a stern platform and a panoramic coachroof; the Feeling 486 and 446 later came from the same mold. The range's largest boats arrived under Alliaura Marine, including the in-house-designed Feeling 48, notable for a distinct aft chine added to increase interior volume in the aft cabins.
Who Feeling is for
Feeling suits a buyer drawn to shoal-draft cruising, where a lifting keel or centerboard reaches anchorages a deeper-draft boat can't, at a price pitched as an accessible alternative to a custom-built yacht. The range's Route du Rhum and Half Ton Cup pedigree gives some models genuine performance credentials, but buyers should expect to research each hull's specific design lineage - Kirié's own designs, the absorbed Kelt line, or the later Alliaura-era boats - rather than assume one consistent story across the whole badge.
