Koopmans sailboats: a Dutch design office's catalog, built by other hands
"Koopmans" on a listing names a design office, not a shipyard. D. Koopmans Jachtontwerpers, founded near Sneek in the Netherlands in 1961 by naval architect Dick Koopmans Sr. and carried forward by his son Dick Koopmans Jr., has drawn the lines for more than 340 boats without building a single one itself, according to NRC Handelsblad. Construction was farmed out to independent yards that varied by era and material — Hutting Yachts building an aluminum line under Koopmans Sr.'s name, the Dutch builder Victoire licensing an early fiberglass production run, and other yards turning out custom steel work. A buyer researching "Koopmans" is researching a design credit that can sit on very different hulls.
Origins and ownership
Dick Koopmans Sr. was born in 1935, the son of a Meppel funeral director who, according to one of Koopmans's own clients, built coffins; as a child, Koopmans learned to build small boats from scrap wood to sail on local ponds and ditches. He worked as a surveyor — including at the Centraal Bureau voor de Watersport and at "het Verbond" — and as a designer at other design offices before opening his own business in 1961, taking on motorboat commissions at first. That year also produced the Schakel, a popular 4.70-meter open centerboard boat he designed together with Ger Luyten. His son, Dick Koopmans Jr., was born in 1962. Sr. worked alone until Jr., after shipbuilding training in Haarlem and graduation from the School for Advanced Technology, joined the firm in 1986; the partnership was then formally established as VOF D. Koopmans Jachtontwerpers. Sr. decided to stop designing in 1998. Jr. has continued the office's design line since, with — in his father's words — slightly more emphasis on the racing element.
The designers
Koopmans is a member of the Netherlands Society of Yacht Designers and Naval Architects (NBJA) and of the Yachts research group at TU Delft, using velocity-prediction programs to refine hull shapes — a data-driven habit reinforced by extensive towing-tank testing of two of the family's own boats, Jantine IV and V, at the TU Delft laboratory tank, which the office credits with much of what it learned about hull resistance and keel and rudder performance. The office designs yachts up to twenty meters. In Dutch sailing circles, "a Koopmans" is a recognized term for timeless, classic lines. Rival Dutch yacht designer André Hoek has described Koopmans yachts as seagoing, long-distance boats, very sturdy with a shallow draft, and "very Dutch" — classic, in his words, "but not too extreme." A typical Koopmans design carries a fairly long foredeck and a relatively small superstructure aft of the mast.
Construction through the eras
Sr. dates the design office's business history to the Victoire 22, a fiberglass cabin yacht of which about two thousand were built — the start of a production-boat line quite unlike the office's later custom work; the oldest boat at a 2011 Koopmans owners' reunion in Lelystad was a Victoire 22 from 1966. That fiberglass lineage carries into the used-boat catalog: the Koopmans 36, designed by D. Koopmans and built in 1987 by Jachtwerf Devo-Hellevoetsluis, has a GRP hull, superstructure, and deck. Separately, Hutting Yachts has built 55 yachts of its "Hutting line" designed by Koopmans Sr., including the Hutting 40, 45, and 50; the Hutting 52, by contrast, was designed by Hoek Design rather than Koopmans, so not every yacht in the Hutting range carries a Koopmans pedigree. Further custom work ran in steel: the Koopmans 39, built in 1995, is a steel S-frame design credited to Koopmans Sr., built to withstand long voyages with its technical equipment kept deliberately simple and its water tank built in above the keel for weight distribution. Construction under the Koopmans name spans this range of eras and materials rather than any single yard's product line.
Who Koopmans is for
Owners of Koopmans-designed boats have a habit of testing them at sea. Eilco Kasemier circumnavigated the globe east to west, including a rounding of Cape Horn, aboard the Koopmans-designed Bylgia in 1973; Cees den Hartoog sailed the Koopmans-designed Sentijn to Australia and back in 1977; the Haverkamp family made repeat over-wintering voyages to Greenland between 2009 and 2014; and Mark van de Weg transited the Northwest Passage aboard the Koopmans-designed Jonathan III in 2013. Koopmans Sr. and his wife, Elly Koopmans-Eijlders — who wrote the widely read books about their own voyages and took the helm when Dick was seasick — sailed their Jantine V to Patagonia, Antarctica, and the Pacific, following an earlier Jantine IV, built in 1979 because Sr. found it hard to combine racing and cruising in one boat, which the family sailed to the Azores and Spitsbergen. Dick Koopmans Jr. has added his own racing record, winning the Round Britain & Ireland Race twice and placing third in the 2009 OSTAR. Buyers drawn to the name are typically after that bluewater-capable reputation — sturdy, shallow-draft, long-distance designs — more than a single factory's finish, and the specific yard, material, and era behind a given hull are what actually vary.