Schöchl sailboats: the Austrian family yard that builds under the Sunbeam name
"Schöchl" names a shipyard, not a separate boat brand. Schöchl Yacht Service, at Mattsee near Salzburg, Austria, is the family builder whose boats have sold under the Sunbeam name since the 1960s, when growing exports required, in the company's own words, "a brand name" — "Schöchl Boote" became "Schöchl Yachtbau," and its sailboats went to market as Sunbeam. This page traces the Schöchl family and design story behind that brand; the Sunbeam page on this site covers the boats themselves and the recent split of the business.
Origins and ownership
The family's roots reach back to a carpentry trade in Mattsee, though the shipyard's own pages disagree on exactly when: Schöchl Yacht Service's company history dates the founding carpentry workshop to 1875, under Gottfried Schöchl, while Sunbeam's own history and YACHT magazine both put the family's carpentry business "as early as 1838." Either way, the firm Schöchl Johann & Söhne remains, by the shipyard's own account, its ancestral house, and Johann Schöchl took over that carpentry business in 1925. Boatbuilding proper began in 1953, when Gottfried and Hans Schöchl founded Schöchl Boote. Family management passed through several generations after: a "quartet" of fathers and sons ran the yard together from 1988 to 1995, cousins Gerhard and Manfred Schöchl took sole charge from 1995, and Manfred's son Andreas succeeded them in 2021, founding Sunbeam Watersports GmbH to carry the Sunbeam brand forward. Per the shipyard's own count, it built or delivered 10,941 sailboats across its first 70 years.
The designers
Schöchl's earliest boats were credited to no outside name at all — the 1956-1968 Mirabell, for instance, is listed in the yard's own chronicle simply as a Schöchl design. Naval architect Ernst Lehfeld's Korsar followed, in production from 1958 to 1977. The Sunbeam brand itself begins with the 1964 Sunbeam 22, designed by Dutch naval architect E. G. van de Stadt and built through 2005; the Austrian designer Miglitsch supplied the Gitana, Aquila, and Manta 19 in the early 1970s, the last of these now covered on this site's own Manta page. J&J Design's long partnership with the yard dates specifically to 1993, with the Sunbeam 44.C, and Nissen Yachtdesign's credits begin in 2000.
Who Schöchl is for
A boat listed under the "Schöchl" name is, in practice, a Sunbeam — built by the same Mattsee, Austria family yard, whether the paperwork uses the builder's own name or its export brand. Buyers researching the boats themselves, current or past, should look to this site's Sunbeam page.