Grand Soleil sailboats: an Italian yard shaped by a rotating cast of outside designers, until it wasn't
For nearly four decades after its founding, Grand Soleil's boats carried the signature of whichever design studio the shipyard had most recently hired — French, Argentine, American, Slovenian, Spanish, German. Seventeen designers have signed a Grand Soleil hull across the brand's history. That changed in 2011, when Cantiere del Pardo, the company behind the name, chose to keep the drawing board entirely Italian. Ownership has shifted just as often, moving from its founder's own hands through a series of investment funds to its current owners.
Origins and ownership
Grand Soleil traces back to Giuseppe Giuliani Ricci, not yet 30 when he took over the bankrupt Sailboats shipyard in Crespellano, near Bologna, financed by a loan from industrialist Raul Gardini. Gardini became one of the yard's first clients himself, commissioning a Dick Carter-designed Orca 43. Cantiere del Pardo was established in 1973, and Grand Soleil presented its first boat, the GS 34, at the Genoa Boat Show that same year; 290 examples were built over the model's first decade. By 2005 the yard built all its cruising boats at facilities in Forlì, also the headquarters of ISB, the holding company that by 2001 had also acquired a 47 percent stake in the French builder Dufour from Credit Agricole's investment arm, beginning that yard's turnaround.
Ownership of ISB later passed to the Rhone Group, a private-equity firm that took a controlling 70 percent stake. In 2020, Cantiere del Pardo added the Netherlands-based VanDutch brand; that year, Italian investor Wise Equity Fund began backing the shipyard financially. Under that backing, revenue reached more than 180 million euros in 2023 — nearly three times 2020 levels — with EBITDA six times higher, and headcount grew past 140 from around 85. The yard was then acquired by the fashion house Calzedonia Group together with Wise Equity, a deal meant to fund international growth across the Grand Soleil, Pardo Yachts and VanDutch brands. President Fabio Planamente describes the yard's history as three milestones: the handoff from founder Giuliani Ricci to a series of investment funds, a 2014 restart after the boating downturn, and the 2015-2017 period that produced the Long Cruise range and Pardo Yachts. The yard has sold more than five thousand yachts under the Grand Soleil name since its founding, and more recently under Pardo Yachts and VanDutch too.
The designers
Jean Marie Finot, then one of the world's leading nautical design studios, drew that first GS 34, followed by the cruising GS 41 and, in 1991, the GS 38. In 1981, wanting boats built to standards competitive with large transalpine yards, Cantiere del Pardo turned to another Frenchman, Alain Jézéquel, whose 1981-1985 designs sold well — 200 units of his GS 39, more than a hundred of the GS 343. Argentine German Frers signed the first of three Grand Soleil designs in 1987, the GS 52 (146 built); his related GS 42 reached 80 examples. Bruce Farr, designer of the previous two Whitbread-winning boats, drew the Grand Soleil Maxi One in 1992; the next year the yard chose Doug Peterson, who had worked on the America³-winning Moro di Venezia, to design a new GS 50. Between 1996 and 1998, Slovenian brothers Japec and Jernej Jakopin, drawing on experience with large German shipyards, designed the GS 37, GS 46.3 and GS 43. Massimo Paperini's Duck Design produced the GS 40 in 2000, World and European IMS Champion in Class C2.
The 2000s brought a heavier regatta emphasis: Friedrich Judel and Rolf Vrolijk, designers of the 2000 America's Cup winner Alinghi, signed three Grand Soleil models, including the GS 44 Race, 2003 Fastnet winner for owner Holmatro, plus the GS 45 and GS 50 series. Marcelino Botín and Shaun Carkeek's first production Grand Soleil, the GS 37, launched in 2004, followed by the GS 40, 43, 46 and 50, all using carbon fiber extensively; a separate Botín & Carkeek GS 42 won the IMS world championship four years running, and Botín's later GS 46 won European Yacht of the Year in 2010. Il Giornale della Vela credits a bigger boat, the GS 56 — sized between Frers' 52 and Farr's Maxi One, with an infused hull and the brand's first double-steering position — to Philippe Briand in 2002; SailUniverse instead dates it to 2003, among Botín & Carkeek's regatta models.
Since 2011, the yard has worked only with Italian designers, starting with Claudio Maletto, a veteran of the Moro di Venezia and Luna Rossa America's Cup campaigns. His GS 39 was the first standard Grand Soleil built with a bulb keel; his GS 43 added the brand's first martingale and its first dolphin bow. From 2020, work narrowed further to a single team, Matteo Polli working exclusively with Nauta Design, from the GS 44 of 2020 — winner of two ORC world championships — to the GS 40 of 2022.
Construction through the eras
Through the Judel/Vrolijk and Botín & Carkeek years of the 2000s, Grand Soleil hulls typically carried an internal galvanized-steel grid bonded into the bilge for structural loads; Judel/Vrolijk patented their version specifically for the voluminous, fast-cruising GS 45 and GS 50. That construction disappeared with Maletto's arrival: his 2011 GS 39 used a composite structure with carbon reinforcements in the floor section instead, lightening the boat while increasing stiffness, and dropped the steel grid used on earlier models.
Lines and generations
Grand Soleil has reused model numbers often enough that an identical name can describe genuinely different boats. The number 43 alone covers three distinct designs: the Jakopin brothers' late-1990s GS 43, the carbon-intensive Botín & Carkeek GS 43 that followed their 2004 GS 37, and Maletto's Italian-era GS 43, with its first martingale bowsprit. The GS 34 name returned in 2018, when the yard's single collaboration with Skyron produced a new racer aimed at recapturing the impact of Finot's original. Every earlier Grand Soleil had been a performance-oriented cruiser-racer; the mid-2010s brought a genuine cruising line when Marco Lostuzzi, with Nauta Design, presented the GS 46 LC — "Long Cruise" — with a carbon-rollbar mainsheet point and a self-tacking jib for shorthanded sailing. From 2025, the Grand Soleil Blue, an 11.30-meter model, marked the shipyard's first entry into day sailers.
Who Grand Soleil is for
Grand Soleil suits buyers drawn to a builder whose identity is a sequence of design partnerships rather than one fixed formula — a regatta pedigree including a Fastnet win, IMS and ORC world championships, and a European Yacht of the Year award, alongside a newer Long Cruise line and a day sailer for buyers who want the brand without the performance edge.
