Piewiet sailboats: a Dutch line named twice over for a bird
Piewiet is not a brand in the usual sense but the in-house boat line of a single small Zeeland yard, Van der Rest Nautic of Kats. Van der Rest designed and built the boats itself, and its mark carries the line's whole story: a stylized lapwing's head on the mainsail, for a line named — in two different Dutch words — after that same bird.
Origins and ownership
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Van der Rest designed and built a cabin sailing yacht called the Kievit. In 1977 the company changed the line's name to Piewiet and holds the trademark registration covering sailboats and other vessels under that name. Van der Rest Nautic itself started in Kats in the early 1970s, building the Kievit and later the Piewiet cabin sailing yachts in a size range of 6.80 to 12.00 metres. Beyond its boats, the company applies the same registered lapwing mark to its boatyard and its two marinas.
The designers
Design credit here runs to the surname "Van der Rest" alone — no source gives a first name, so any fuller name attached to the founder should be treated as unconfirmed. A separate credit is worth correcting outright: the Piewiet 1050 is sometimes listed as designed by E.G. van de Stadt. It was not. That credit belongs to an unrelated commission, the Pion one-design, whose winning design was drawn up by Van de Stadt's firm and worked out in practice by Koos de Ridder under his supervision. Van der Rest Nautic was afterward one of several Dutch yards — alongside Lewin of Vianen, Frans Maas of Breskens, and Friendship — that built Pion hulls from that same mould. That was a building job, not a design credit, and it has nothing to do with the Kievit/Piewiet line, which was Van der Rest's own design throughout.
Construction through the eras
The line was built in fibreglass, the Piewiet 930 among them. Van der Rest Nautic says the knowledge it gained building and repairing polyester boats carried over into a glass-fibre-reinforced-plastics sideline the company also runs, and back again. The company attributes its quality emphasis to ISO 9001 certification.
Lines and generations
The Kievit-to-Piewiet rename was tested in court. Harpol c.s., at one point entitled to build the earlier Kievit 680, brought a modernized version called the Kievit 22 to market and advertised it at the HISWA 2006 boat show with a stylized lapwing head on the spinnaker and hull. Van der Rest responded by filing additional image-mark registrations on 23 March 2006, covering sailboats and other vessels, the construction and repair of sailboats and shipbuilding, and the operation of marinas. The Rechtbank Leeuwarden decided the resulting case, Van der Rest against Harpol c.s., on 2 May 2006 under case number KG ZA 06-100, and found that although the Van der Rest mark and the Harpol sign were not identical, the overall impression they left with the average consumer was that the two corresponded visually to a high degree. The two registered marks themselves differ in a small, telling way: the 1977 mark is drawn in black on white facing left, the 2006 mark in white on grey facing right.
Who Piewiet is for
Piewiet suits a buyer drawn to a small, well-documented piece of Dutch sailing history rather than a widely supported production brand — the line was built by one yard, in one place, under one name change. The yard that designed and built the Kievit and Piewiet lines operates as a marina, yacht-service, and boat-storage business with locations in Kats and Wemeldinge. Its Kats marina sits in the town's original work harbour, recognizable from a distance by the two tall gantry cranes once used to build the Zeelandbrug.
