Nordship sailboats: one Danish yard's shift to individually built deck saloons
Nordship Yachts was a single Danish builder based in Lunderskov, describing itself as one man's vision to build Danish centre-cockpit deck saloon yachts for long-distance voyaging — that man being founder Lars Buchwald. What began as a subcontracting operation making accommodation fit-outs for established Danish shipyards grew into a company whose own Deck Saloon Yachts eventually became its entire model program, each one built individually to a client's wishes rather than off a standard line. In 2025 the yard's story folded into that of fellow Danish builder Faurby Yachts, whose name the deck-saloon range carried forward from there.
Origins and ownership
Nordship dates its own founding to 1978, when Lars Buchwald started the company as Buchwald Yachtværft, initially as a subcontractor building accommodation for several well-known Danish shipyards rather than complete boats. A 2023 test in YACHT, the German trade publication, instead puts the founding at 1987; this account follows the company's own history. In 1988 Buchwald acquired the rights to the Nordship boat program, launching an extensive development effort, and the Nordship name came to dominate the yard's output so completely that the company itself was renamed Nordship Yachts ApS. The yard moved to its address in Lunderskov in 2008, the same year it marked its 30th anniversary, and by 2018 — its 40th year in the industry — Nordship was regarded as one of the leading builders of deck saloon yachts.
That same year, 2018, Nordship and the Danish builder Faurby Yachts entered common ownership, though the two brands continued to build boats under separate management. By 2023 Thomas Dan Hougaard was serving as co-owner alongside founder and house designer Lars Buchwald, having become joint owner of Nordship following the Faurby tie-up. The arrangement changed decisively in May 2025: Nordship fully joined forces with Faurby, Buchwald departed as managing director, and Faurby Yachts took over the combined business and brand portfolio under Thomas Hougaard, with Nordship's deck-saloon lineup — the 360, 420, 450, 500, and 570 DS — built and marketed under the Faurby name from that point. Borghegn Yachtdesign's own account of its work independently corroborates the merger, describing the Faurby 450 as the first model built after Faurby and Nordship's brands combined.
The designers
Lars Buchwald was Nordship's founder and its house designer — an in-house Nordship design credit meant work by Buchwald himself, and buyers of a new Nordship traditionally sat down directly with him to work through plans and layout. On the yard's later Deck Saloon Yachts, that in-house design was paired with outside expertise: technical data for the Nordship 420 DS credits the design jointly to Lars Buchwald and Arne Borghegn.
Borghegn ran his own practice, Borghegn Yachtdesign, founded in 1977 as what he described as a passion project blending boat design with race sailing; as its reputation grew, it drew collaborations with Nordship alongside other Danish builders including Luffe, Bredgaard, and Motiva. Nordship, in turn, used Borghegn's services well beyond its standard production line, particularly for its Custom Line — boats tailored to a specific customer's precise wishes. Arne Borghegn died in 2020; his son Axel, who had joined the firm's board in 2017, continued to lead Borghegn Yachtdesign afterward.
Construction through the eras
Nordship's hulls and decks were built by hand lay-up, a sandwich construction using a foam core and vinyl ester resins, with full laminate below the waterline, laminated bulkheads, and the deck glued and screwed to the hull. Inside, a bonded galvanized steel frame took the structural loads from the keel and the mast compression post, and wherever cabinetry or bulkheads touched the hull or deck, they too were laminated in place to add rigidity. The keel itself was GRP, with bolts laminated through the top, bottom, and fin to attach it — and its lead ballast — to the hull.
Lines and generations
Nordship's earliest boats, including the 28 and 666 of the early 1980s, came before the yard settled on the form it became known for. In the early 1990s Nordship introduced its first deck-saloon yachts, and from that point its model program consisted only of individually built Deck Saloon Yachts, each finished to a specific client's wishes; the yard came to be known for including deck saloons on its fibreglass cruising boats more broadly. A 2023 test put Nordship's output, after the Faurby merger, at around a dozen boats a year — a small-batch scale consistent with individually built construction.
Who Nordship is for
A used Nordship suits a buyer drawn to a small Danish yard's take on the centre-cockpit deck saloon: boats built individually, in modest numbers, for long-distance voyaging rather than off a standard mold. Because the brand's own designer sat down with each buyer, and because its later Custom Line leaned even further into bespoke work, the boats reward someone who values that direct, made-to-order relationship over a larger production builder's economies of scale. With the brand's deck-saloon lineage continuing under the Faurby name, that same design pairing of Buchwald's house eye and Borghegn's outside partnership lives on there rather than under the Nordship badge itself.
