Jongert sailboats: a Dutch custom yard built on aluminium
Jongert is a Dutch shipyard founded in 1953 in Opperdoes, a small village in North Holland. It has specialised in semi-custom and custom luxury sailing and motor yachts, mainly built in steel or aluminium, since the 1950s, and its global fleet includes more than 325 launches. The yard's identity has stayed fixed on custom construction through repeated relocations to larger facilities and several changes of ownership.
Origins and ownership
The Jongert family founded the yard in Opperdoes in 1953. During the 1960s it relocated to larger facilities in Medemblik to take on more ambitious projects, and in that same decade became one of the first European yards to build sailing yachts in aluminium. In the 1990s the yard moved again, to a new site a few miles north of Medemblik in Wieringerwerf, with direct deepwater access; the new facility included covered building halls able to accommodate yachts up to 70 metres, plus paint facilities and engineering workshops. Jongert remained a family-owned business until 2008, when its majority stake was sold; the following year the yard was acquired by the VeKa Group after the family had to hand over control amid financial difficulties. Acico Yachts took over the shipyard in 2015 and retained the Jongert name. In early 2026, Dutch investor Hans Kortlevers — previously active mainly in property and tourism through his Swiss company, LMEY Investments AG — took over the yard.
The designers
Jongert's first sail models, the Zwalkers and Trewes, were developed in the early 1960s with designer Willem de Vries Lentsch. In its late-1970s and 1980s era, the yard worked with naval architects Sparkman & Stephens and Andrea Vallicelli on designs that produced multiple Superyacht of the Year award winners. Later design partners included Doug Peterson, Tony Castro, and André Hoek, working alongside Jongert's own in-house design team rather than replacing it outright. In Germany, the brand was long associated with a Düsseldorf regatta sailor known in the trade as "Mr Jongert" — Herbert Dahm, who shaped the brand's standing in the maxi-yacht market with the Jongert 2200S Inspiration in the mid-1980s and represented Jongert in Germany until his death in 2024.
Construction through the eras
Aluminium construction, adopted in the 1960s, became one of Jongert's defining traits: its sailing yachts pair aluminium hulls with hand-finished teak interior joinery, built by Wieringerwerf-based master builders who combine Dutch boatbuilding practice with more recent engineering methods. In the 1990s the yard expanded beyond sailing yachts into motor yacht construction alongside its existing work.
Who Jongert is for
Jongert suits a buyer looking for a custom or semi-custom yacht in steel or aluminium from a single Dutch yard, rather than a production model from a large builder — someone drawn to a design lineage that runs from de Vries Lentsch's early Zwalkers and Trewes through the Sparkman & Stephens and Vallicelli era and several Superyacht of the Year wins, and on to later work with Doug Peterson, Tony Castro, and André Hoek. It's a brand with real depth of history, though one that has changed ownership several times since the 2008 sale of its majority stake — worth weighing against any individual yacht's own condition and maintenance record.