Felci sailboats: a designer's credit, not a builder's name
A boat listed under "Felci" was not built by a company called Felci -- there isn't one. Felci Yacht Design is the Italian naval-architecture studio founded by Umberto Felci, and a "Felci" credit on a hull means his studio drew it, not that his studio built it. The one boat in this catalog under the name is a Grand Soleil 58, built by Cantiere del Pardo and co-designed by Felci together with Nauta Yachts -- a boat that, by rights, belongs to its builder's own range. Understanding a Felci listing means understanding whose studio put pen to the plans, and which yard actually turned those plans into a hull.
Origins and ownership
Umberto Felci was born in Milan in 1964 and developed his passion for sailing on Lake Garda. His early career ran through top-level racing: he was part of the "Il Moro di Venezia" team's America's Cup challenge, which reached the finals in 1991, and in 1993 he designed and built the first Italian Mini Transat entry, Té Salt, which placed third at its debut in the French Championship. Looking back across thirty years of work, Felci has named Té Salt -- built in a shed -- as the boat that marked him most emotionally, and Yachts Croatia credits him as the "father" of racing designs such as the UFO 28.
Felci met engineer Lorenzo Giovannozzi in 1998 at a yacht-design specialization course in Florence, and in 2001 the two founded the studio together with Felci's wife, Elda Cortinovis -- deliberately built as a multi-skilled team rather than a one-man show. Cortinovis, an economics graduate, handles administration, media and web management and is entrusted with the studio's managerial decisions and its investment in research and resources; Felci credits her background with making decades of work sustainable. He credits Giovannozzi, in turn, with the insight to expand the studio into cruising-boat design, which produced their first fast cruisers.
The designers
The technical team grew alongside the founders. Naval architect Gabriel Treddenti, who trained at Germán Frers's school in Argentina before adding race-field and boatyard experience, joined in 2003; engineer Guillaume Petit followed in 2004. Both became senior designers handling interiors, deck plans and construction details. Felci Yacht Design organizes its output into three channels -- racing, series production and custom -- with the custom channel developed first through the yard Yacht 2000 and then especially through Ice Yachts. After nearly thirty years, the studio's output runs past one hundred boat models, from dinghies to megayachts and cruising catamarans to pure racing monohulls.
Construction through the eras
The studio's earliest significant partnership was with a yard then called Yacht 2000, later renamed Ice Yacht after rising from the defunct Alpa. A 70-footer for that yard, Videlle, led to a line of five FY 70s, and from that mold came a custom Grand Soleil 70 -- the boat that started Felci's long relationship with Cantiere del Pardo.
Dufour became the studio's dominant client. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the French yard was itself owned by Cantiere del Pardo, and it was that Italian ownership that first commissioned Felci to design new Dufours. The relationship began in 2002 with the naval architecture of a new performance range, the Dufour 34, 40 and 44, and has since grown to more than thirty models designed since 2002, spanning several changes of ownership at the yard. Yachts Croatia describes the studio as inseparable from Dufour, designing all of its projects, and Giornale della Vela credits Felci's Dufour work with making him one of the best-known Italian designers abroad. The Dufour 530 won Sail Magazine's "Best Boat 2021" award in the large-monohull-50ft category, and at the 2023 European Yacht of the Year awards Felci Yacht Design was the only studio with two nominees: the Dufour 37 and Ice Yachts' Ice 62 Targa -- a repeat of an earlier double nomination in which the Dufour 405 and the Esse 850 both went on to win.
For Cantiere del Pardo directly, Felci designed the Grand Soleil 72 Custom, the GS 44, GS 45 and GS 50 over the years, and, together with Nauta Yachts, the Grand Soleil 58 -- the boat that anchors this catalog's single listing entry and that won Vela e Motore/Edisport's "Boat of the Year" award in 2016. Persico Marine built the Felci 65, a custom one-off in carbon that Felci designed to be performance-oriented while still serving as a cruiser; it was nominated for the International Yacht & Aviation Award in 2018.
Who Felci is for
A buyer who encounters "Felci" on a listing is looking at a design credit, not a factory. The name points to Umberto Felci's studio and, through it, to whichever yard actually built the boat -- Dufour above all, but also Cantiere del Pardo's Grand Soleil range, Ice Yachts, or Persico Marine. In this catalog that credit traces to one boat, a Grand Soleil 58, best understood on the strength of its actual builder's own page rather than as a "Felci" in the way a Beneteau or a Catalina would be a Beneteau or a Catalina.