Sunbeam sailboats: an Austrian family yard whose ownership split down its own product line
Sunbeam builds its sailboats in landlocked Austria, a detail Yachting Monthly has called out about the Schöchl family boatbuilder behind the brand. The company's most consequential recent chapter, though, isn't a boat at all: in 2020-21, the family business split in two, with the Sunbeam name and its lake-oriented range staying with one branch of the family while the yard's larger cruising line continued under a cousin's separate company.
Origins and ownership
Sunbeam traces its family's woodworking trade back to the nineteenth century, though the company's own accounts don't agree on exactly when it began. Sunbeam's own history states the Schöchl family founded a carpentry business in Mattsee, near Salzburg, "as early as 1838," a date YACHT magazine independently corroborates, tracing the yard's origins to "a joinery that was founded in 1838." Schöchl Yacht Service's own company history, by contrast, names Gottfried Schöchl, Senior, as the family's "actual founding father," dating his carpentry workshop's opening to 1875.
Boatbuilding entered the family business well into the twentieth century. Sunbeam's own history dates the start of its "era of boat building" to 1950, without naming individuals; Schöchl Yacht Service's account is more specific, crediting brothers Hans and Gottfried Schöchl with building the family's first boat — a 10-square-meter racing dinghy — in the family carpentry workshop in 1953. Series production of keelboats began in 1965, alongside an expansion of the Mattsee shipyard, which was rebuilt and enlarged to 4,000 square meters in 1975 and extended again in 2001 with a roughly 1,500-square-meter hall. Exports reached the U.S. and Japan from the mid-1980s, and the company founded a German subsidiary, Schöchl-Yachting-Germany, in 1998.
Management passed to the next generation in stages: engineer Manfred Schöchl joined the family company in 1978, and his cousin, MA engineer Gerhard Schöchl, joined in 1990; the two took over the shipyard's management together in 1995. By an October 2018 shipyard visit, Gerhard Schöchl was being described as "owner and mastermind" behind the company. That changed in 2020-21 — Sunbeam's own history gives 2020 in its German-language timeline and 2021 in English — when the family business split. Until then, the company had built two product lines, "Lake Line" and "Blue Water Cruiser," under one roof. Manfred's son, Andreas Schöchl, took over the shipyard's management and founded Sunbeam Watersports GmbH to carry the Sunbeam name and its Lake Line boats forward; Gerhard Schöchl, who Andreas confirmed in a February 2021 interview "has left the company and will go a separate way," continued the larger Blue Water Cruiser line as modern semi-custom yachts under a separate company, Schöchl Yacht Service.
Sunbeam Watersports GmbH went on to relocate the shipyard itself. YACHT magazine, describing Sunbeam as Austria's largest shipyard, reported that the company left its longtime Mattsee site after 75 years there for a new production facility in Munderfing, Upper Austria, roughly ten minutes by car from the original headquarters — construction overseen by Andreas Schöchl.
The designers
Sunbeam's most visible recent design shift, the 32.1, has a more specific authorship than it first appears. Andreas Schöchl has said the hull was drawn not by the yard's longtime naval architecture partner but by industrial design bureau Kiska, with that partner, J&J Design, responsible for the naval architecture and construction engineering rather than the styling. Andreas has said he pursued the change because he was "bored of white fibreglass yachts that all looked virtually the same" and wanted to build boats that stood out. Interior design has run through a different partner: Studio Barbara Gollackner, of Salzburg, designed the below-deck interior of the Sunbeam 29.1 and had previously designed the interior of the Sunbeam 46. On the 36.1, Yachting Monthly credited the Schöchl family's own hand — alongside outside naval architects such as Hanse's Judel/Vrolijk and Nordship's Lars Buchwald — in shaping the boat's two-crew cockpit ergonomics. The yard's stylized three-tickmark logo, meanwhile, traces to an old advertising slogan, "Schnell! Siegreich! Schöchl!" ("fast, victorious, Schöchl!"), according to Gerhard Schöchl.
Construction through the eras
Sunbeam's hulls moved from solid to sandwich laminate ahead of the 36.1's 2012 launch, a switch YACHT dated to the year before. The largest boat built under the unified pre-split company, the 46.1, used a hand-laminated inner and outer hull; Gerhard Schöchl said its anchor-chain locker was fully laminated to act as a crash-box in a collision, with a second laminated crash-box at the sail-locker bulkhead giving the yacht two in total. The smaller, more recent daysailers use GRP sandwich construction with a foam core, built by hand lay-up; on the 29.1, hull moulding comes from certified suppliers in Poland, with construction, outfitting, and quality control carried out in Austria. That same boat also avoids tropical wood entirely, using RESYSTA — a material made from rice husks and mineral salts — as an alternative to teak for deck covering.
Lines and generations
The Lake Line and Blue Water Cruiser split that formalized in 2020-21 reflects a distinction that ran through Sunbeam's range well before the company itself divided. The 46.1, winner of the 2019 European Yacht of the Year award, represented the deep-water end of that lineup under the unified company. Since the split, Sunbeam Watersports GmbH's Lake Line has carried the brand forward with a run of Kiska-influenced daysailers: the 32.1, which Yachting Monthly called "the first model developed under the new ownership" of the yard, won a Red Dot Design Award in 2022, and the follow-on 29.1 daysailer pairs Barbara Gollackner's interior with a hydraulic swivel keel that reduces draft to just 0.85 meters. The earlier 22.1, launched in 2016, previewed that shoal-draft approach with a standard swivelling keel and an attached, swivelling rudder developed with J&J Design. The Blue Water Cruiser line, meanwhile, continues today as modern semi-custom yachts — no longer built under the Sunbeam name, but by Gerhard Schöchl's team at Schöchl Yacht Service.
Who Sunbeam is for
Sunbeam remains a small, family-run Austrian yard whose sailboats trace to a nineteenth-century woodworking trade, and its recent history is inseparable from a family business that split rather than simply changed hands. That makes it a builder for buyers drawn less to scale than to a shipyard with a specific, name-carrying lineage — and, in its Lake Line boats, to swing-keel and shoal-draft engineering built as readily for landlocked Austria's lakes as for coastal water.
