Larsen sailboats: one boatbuilder's career carried across four small Danish yards
Larsen is not a company so much as the working life of one man. Hans Aage Larsen, a boatbuilder based at Østervang 18 in Maribo, on the Danish island of Lolland, built and later designed fiberglass sailboats across a string of small Lolland-Falster operations that carried his own name for only part of that career.
Origins and ownership
Larsen started as an employee, not a founder. He was working at the Bandholm shipyard owned by Knud Olsen — father of designer Lars Olsen — when it was decided that Larsen would strike out on his own and build the L23, a keelboat Lars Olsen had designed in 1975, not a design of Larsen's own. He built the class's first hull in the winter of 1976, working from the basement of the house where he lived in Hunseby, before production moved to what became his own yard, Aages Værft, in Maribo. The L23 class association credits him with the first 350 hulls of the class; Dansk Sejlunion, the national sailing federation, gives the figure as 349, built in Bandholm. Larsen gave up L23 production in 1983, driven out by a hard stretch of rising oil prices and the higher raw-material costs that followed.
He then founded his own company, Larsen Boat, building the Larsen 25 and Larsen 28 under his own name for the first time. Larsen Boat later went bankrupt, and Nyboat ApS, a yard in Vordingborg, took over the building rights and put Larsen back on payroll, this time as an employee rather than an owner. A photograph in Maribo's local-history archive, dated 25 May 1990, shows him presenting what it calls his newest construction — a boat named "Miss Marjan," the Larsen 232. Hans Aage Larsen, known to friends as "Briketten," died on 2 August 2010.
Who Larsen is for
Buyers drawn to the Larsen name are buying into a single designer-builder's hand rather than a marque with corporate continuity. The L23, built early in Larsen's career, is documented by its own class association and by Dansk Sejlunion, the national sailing federation; the Larsen-branded boats that followed are scarcer, tied directly to the small Lolland-Falster yards he worked through for the rest of his career.
