Lagoon catamarans: a Jeanneau racing offshoot that became Beneteau's volume cruising house
Lagoon began in 1984 as an arm of Jeanneau Techniques Avancées (JTA), Jeanneau's advanced-technics department — a racing pedigree that shaped its earliest catamarans before the brand changed hands and changed direction. VPLP Design launched Lagoon's first catamarans in 1987, two 55-foot, 14-ton sisterships built by Jean-François de Prémorel and Jeanneau Techniques Avancées. Lagoon marked its 6,000th catamaran in 2021 and its 7,000th in 2024, when the brand also marked 40 years in business. That growth spans two distinct chapters: an independent, performance-minded startup, and the comfort-oriented production house Lagoon became once Beneteau bought in.
Origins and ownership
Lagoon's own account of its founding centers on its first customer's boat. The name that kept coming up when the founders looked for a brand name was the one that customer had already given her new 55: "Lagoon." They liked it enough to sign an agreement on a restaurant table — a contract on a napkin promising her royalties if they sold more boats under her boat's name — with a ten-year limit on the deal.
In 1995, Beneteau, already a leader in cruising monohull production, purchased Lagoon, and the brand's direction took a turn. Beneteau took over the Jeanneau shipyard and handed development of the Lagoon range to Construction Navale Bordeaux (CNB), which Lagoon describes as one of the most respected shipyards in the superyacht world. Beneteau's own company history credits that first series production of Lagoon catamarans, in the 1990s, with making the brand the leading builder in the multihull sailing segment; by the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lagoon had also taken over market leadership in catamaran production from the UK's Prout, which had drifted into financial difficulty.
Lagoon's Vendée and Bordeaux shipyards hold ISO 9001 quality-standard certification, and in 2017 the yard was building 400 boats a year. In 2025 Lagoon launched a NEO program refitting older flagship models such as the 620.
The designers
VPLP Design, founded in 1983 by Marc Van Peteghem and Vincent Lauriot-Prévost, who met at the Southampton School of Naval Architecture, has been Lagoon's naval architect since those first 1987 catamarans. VPLP's own account describes the pair as leaders in multihull design, credited with winning more awards for racing-multihull designs than any other design firm.
Patrick le Quément, formerly Director of Industrial Design at Renault, contributes exterior design to Lagoon models. Interiors have belonged to Nauta Design, the Italian studio founded by Mario Pedol and Massimo Gino, since 1985. A fourth name belongs to one specific hull: Morrelli and Melvin, who later went on to design the early Gunboats, drew the Lagoon 35.
Construction through the eras
Lagoon builds its hulls using infusion technology, which the yard says allows for a more precisely adjusted amount of resin and facilitates balsa sandwich construction; each hull relies on a fixed fin keel rather than a centerboard, which Lagoon considers too fragile and complicated for cruising service. Every hull is designed to meet CE unsinkability standards for multihulls, with the forward and aft compartments of each hull separated from the living space by watertight bulkheads, and the bridgedeck nacelle shaped with what Lagoon calls a "seagull's wing" profile for smoother passage through the water.
The range's earliest US-built boats, the Lagoon 42 and 37, came from Tillotson Pearson Inc. (TPI), a pioneer of the composite infusion process the rest of the line would later adopt; the Lagoon 35, from the same early period, used the related SCRIMP resin-infusion process over a balsa core. That boat also marks a hinge point: it was the last Lagoon built with a priority of performance over comfort before Beneteau's purchase, and the 410 that followed was the first model of the new CNB-era design series, veering the brand toward comfort over performance. One later hull broke from that pattern in materials rather than mission — the 570 added carbon-fiber reinforcement in high-load and impact areas, an exception rather than the rule for the range's construction.
Lines and generations
One historical timeline, compiled by the multihull specialist site Katamarans, places Lagoon's first design generation as just two boats, the 55 and 57, running from 1987 to 1995 — the founding customer's 55 among them. A second generation, from 1997 to 2005, added the 380, 410, 470, and 570. The Lagoon 440, launched in 2004, opened a third generation and introduced the flybridge to the range. A fourth generation began in 2012 with the 52F, and a fifth launched in 2017 with the Seventy 7 flagship; the brand revived the 55 name again in 2021, the same year as its 6,000th catamaran.
Outside that main generational spine, the brand's early US-built boats followed their own path: the Lagoon 37 was chosen by charter operator the Moorings and rebranded the Moorings 3700, while the Lagoon 42 name returned in 2016 for a new design, the 42-2.
Who Lagoon is for
Lagoon's arc explains what the brand has become: a volume-built, CNB-engineered catamaran house that has kept one naval-architecture partner across four decades while changing hands from an independent Jeanneau offshoot to one of European boatbuilding's largest groups. Buyers drawn to that scale get production support, parts availability, and a design lineage that runs in a straight line from VPLP's first 1987 hulls to its newest flagships. Buyers chasing the brand's original, performance-first identity are better served looking to its earliest, pre-Beneteau boats than to the comfort-oriented range that followed.
