Laurent Giles sailboats: a Lymington design office behind boats built almost everywhere else
"Laurent Giles" on a boat is a design credit, not a builder's mark. Jack Laurent Giles founded his naval-architecture practice in Lymington, England, in 1927, and the firm's own history counts more than 1,400 design projects produced since — commissions carried out at whichever yard held the contract, from E.F. Elkins of Christchurch and Cheoy Lee of Hong Kong to Vosper Thorneycroft and Benetti. Two designs carry the office's reputation more than any others: the Vertue, a 25-foot cruiser built in more than 200 examples across three decades and two continents, and WANDERER III, the 30-foot sloop built for Eric and Susan Hiscock that twice earned sailing's Blue Water Medal. A buyer running into the Laurent Giles name is buying into that design lineage — and needs to work out, boat by boat, which yard actually built the hull.
Origins and ownership
Jack Laurent Giles was born in Yorkshire in 1901 and raised in Scarborough, where he later said he first got the idea of designing yachts at school — and where he likely crossed paths with yacht designer Albert Strange, then headmaster of the town's School of Art. His formal education is disputed: the firm's own history credits him as a graduate in Engineering Science from Cambridge, while WoodenBoat's account instead has him studying engineering at Oxford and then naval architecture at Durham. He first worked as an engineer at Vickers-Armstrongs, the Tyneside shipbuilding conglomerate, before moving to Southampton in 1925, at age 24, to work under Charles E. Nicholson of the Camper & Nicholsons yard, and founded Laurent Giles & Partners in Lymington in 1927.
Jack Laurent Giles died in 1969 while at work on the 26-foot Westerly Centaur, a boat that went on to more than 2,500 built. Afterward, the office kept close design partnerships with Westerly and Moody, and by its own account was responsible for the great majority of UK production sailboats through the early 1980s. By 1983, with many founding partners retired, the firm re-formed as Laurent Giles Naval Architects Ltd and shifted toward larger custom work: the 46-metre steel-and-aluminium White Gull for Benetti, the motor yacht Dalvina for Berthon in 1989, and The Other Woman, a 1993 award winner that was, at launch, the largest all-aluminium yacht built.
Construction through the eras
Before any of that, the office's early portfolio ran through America's Cup-class racing with Flica II and a string of Royal Ocean Racing Club yachts. Individual commissions pushed into new materials: the 63-foot motor yacht Tamahine, built by Vosper Thorneycroft in 1933; Shyraga, launched in 1955 by Abeking & Rasmussen; and Blue Leopard, an ultra-lightweight 1962 motor sailer from William Osbourne, cold-moulded on laminated frames with aluminium floors and a ply-and-balsa sandwich deck. The office's own history also credits it with Gulvain, described — without a date attached — as "one of the first" all-aluminium offshore racing yachts, and separately claims to have been "one of the first" to adopt GRP construction, in the early 1960s. Diadem of Dewlish, a 96-foot tender built for Tony Boyden at Richards Shipyards to follow the 1962 America's Cup, rounded out that run.
Lines and generations
The Vertue traces back through two earlier Laurent Giles designs. The Lymington L-Class, the office's eighth design, launched its first two boats — Isabella and Penguine, both built by Elkins of Christchurch — in 1933; eighteen were launched in total by 1939, from Elkins and several other yards, and Yachting Monthly's 1933 review called the type "conspicuously dry and well-mannered," noting it "repeatedly out-sailed their rivals" in light winds. A "Revised L," five inches longer with a doghouse and larger portholes, followed as the office's 203rd design in 1955, first built in 1956 and, remarkably, still being built as late as 1994. Off that lineage came the 25-foot Andrillot, which in turn led to the Vertue — what WoodenBoat calls the most successful design of Jack Laurent Giles's career, with more than 200 built since the prototype launched in 1936, its name honoring the Vertue Cup, a literary prize the Little Ship Club awarded annually. E.F. Elkins of Christchurch built most of the classic wooden Vertues, in teak-and-mahogany planking over English oak framing with lead keels and bronze floors, through 1962; Cheoy Lee of Hong Kong picked up the type the following year, and roughly 30 more were later built in GRP by yards including Westerly and Bossoms of Oxford. Humphrey Barton, the firm's chief surveyor and author of Vertue XXXV, made the 1950 transatlantic crossing in Vertue No. 35 that established the design's reputation; Barton later owned a Rambler-class Laurent Giles design of his own, Rose Rambler.
WANDERER III, the 30-foot sloop Laurent Giles designed and King's yard of Burnham-on-Crouch built for Eric and Susan Hiscock, carried them on their first circumnavigation in 1952-55; her hull was built with no glue at all — elm keel, spruce stringers, white-oak stem and beams, and slightly oversized iroko planking for strength. She twice won sailing's Blue Water Medal, in 1955 and again in 2011 — the only yacht so honored twice — and Eric Hiscock judged her "probably as small a boat as any sober-minded individual with a proper respect for the sea would care to take across an ocean." The office answered what it saw as WANDERER III's shortcomings with the 30-foot Wanderer class, a wider, roomier production version with more freeboard and a continuous coach roof. Dyarchy, a traditionally-planked 47-foot gaff cutter, was admired enough that WANDERER III's later owner Thies Matzen considered building along her lines himself.
The Laurent Giles 43, built from 1961 by A.H. Moody & Son of Swanwick in carvel teak planking on hardwood frames, ran to at least 16 boats in its Donella class; its higher freeboard and fuller waterlines were designed in at the request of class leader Donella's first owner, who wanted more berths and a way below decks that didn't cross an open cockpit.
Who Laurent Giles is for
Buyers are usually drawn to Laurent Giles for one of a few reasons: the voyaging pedigree of WANDERER III and the Vertue, boats built to go to sea rather than around a racecourse; the change-of-era construction story running from Elkins's classic wood joinery through Cheoy Lee's imported hulls to the office's early forays into GRP and aluminium; or a specific one-off like the Laurent Giles 43, built to a single owner's brief for practical living aboard. None of it is a single factory product — it's nearly a century of naval-architecture credit, applied by whichever yard held the commission.
