Wauquiez sailboats: a tannery family's turn toward premium French cruisers
Wauquiez traces to a personal purchase rather than a business plan: in 1964, Henri Wauquiez and his wife Véronique bought an Elizabethan 29, an 8.8-meter sloop designed by the English architect Kim Holman. Henri, born into a family of tanners in the north of France, had trained in England at the Northampton Tannery School, earning both an engineering degree and one in organic chemistry, and had served as a second lieutenant during his military service in Algeria in 1955. Taken with the Elizabethan 29, he contacted Holman and arranged to bring the boat into the French market through the English builder Webster's shipyards. When Webster's could not keep pace with the orders Henri was generating, he began building the boat himself, converting part of the family tannery into a boatyard that took his name in 1965: Chantiers Wauquiez.
Origins and ownership
The new yard grew quickly. By 1966, according to Voiles et Voiliers, the Elizabethan 29 was followed by a larger Elizabethan 35, built at Wauquiez's Mouvaux site in the Lille suburbs. Henri made the business a family affair, hiring his own father — a casualty of the crisis then hitting the leather trade — into the growing company. His production standards impressed Kim Holman enough to deepen their design partnership through the following decade, and in 1985 French President François Mitterrand awarded Henri the National Order of Merit, recognizing both the company's export record and his tenure as president of the Nautical Industries federation.
Ownership changed hands repeatedly after Henri's era. Bénéteau bought Chantiers Wauquiez in 1997 and narrowed its range to two models occupying a smaller niche — a contraction that, by most accounts, slowed the brand. Bénéteau sold the yard on to the industrial group Verdoso Industry in 2008, which put three million euros of fresh capital into the business from the outset. That capital wasn't enough to insulate Wauquiez from the financial crisis: in July 2009, the yard — by then based in Neuville-en-Ferrain, near Lille, and employing 93 people — requested and was placed under a French court's safeguard procedure while stating it was not insolvent; 2008 revenue of 15 million euros was expected to fall to just under 10 million euros in 2009. Even mid-restructuring, Wauquiez pressed ahead with new models, planning to show a 39-foot Opium and a new 65-foot Pilot Saloon at that year's Cannes boat show. The yard changed hands again before EXEL Industries acquired it in 2021, folding Wauquiez into a pool of brands with Rhéa Marine and Tofinou spread across three French sites — Neuville-en-Ferrain, La Rochelle, and Port Camargue — generating roughly 15 million euros in sales and employing about 100 people that year. EXEL said the purchase affirmed its ambition to diversify into the nautical field and would let it "reconnect with the powerful image of Wauquiez" while drawing on the group's financial strength. Patrick Ballu, EXEL's chairman, cited a personal thread alongside the business case: his father, Vincent Ballu, had owned two Wauquiez sailboats the whole family sailed together. Nine months into the acquisition, EXEL Yachting's director Cyril Ballu said Wauquiez, Rhéa, and Tofinou were "very good brands that need to regain the DNA and dynamism of their founders" — while staying premium rather than chasing volume.
The designers
Kim Holman and his firm Holman & Pye anchored Wauquiez's first two decades of design, starting with the Elizabethan 29 and 35 and continuing through the 1968 Centurion 32, a 9.75-meter fixed-keel sloop that sold 380 units and became one of the yard's signature boats. Holman & Pye followed with the 13-meter Amphitrite in 1975 — a ketch-rigged cruiser notable for its raised aft doghouse and central cockpit — the Amphora in 1976, the Gladiateur in 1977, and the Prétorien in 1979, extending the sportier line the Centurion had begun. Wauquiez even drew some of these model names, including Centurion, Gladiateur, and Prétorien, from "Guerre d'Algérie" (Les Centurions), the Jean Lartéguy novel that was Henri's favorite book — a fittingly personal echo of his own Algerian military service two decades earlier.
English designer Ed Dubois succeeded Holman & Pye in the mid-1980s, drawing the Centurion 47 in 1984 and, in 1987, both the Centurion 38 (with Humphrey) and the Centurion 36. In 2000, Wauquiez began a new collaboration with French designers Jean Berret and Olivier Racoupeau, whose first credited model, the Pilot Saloon 40, introduced the raised-saloon layout that would define the line; Berret-Racoupeau's interior team went on to shape the Pilot Saloon 42 and 48, several Centurions, and the Optio, and the firm has described the Pilot Saloon's raised layout as delivering panoramic visibility and easier handling without giving up performance. Marc Lombard joined the roster in 2010 with the Opium 39 and, in 2024, drew the flagship Wauquiez 55 together with Roseo — the newest chapter in a design lineage running from Kim Holman through Ed Dubois, Berret-Racoupeau, and now Lombard.
Construction through the eras
Wauquiez builds its hulls by resin infusion, a method the yard says optimizes the resin-to-fiber ratio and controls weight, and constructs both decks and hulls in balsa-cored sandwich for rigidity and thermal and acoustic insulation. The company frames this as a deliberate choice: rather than pursue industrialization, Wauquiez has said it prefers to let its craftsmanship speak for itself.
Lines and generations
Two model families carry most of Wauquiez's identity. The Centurion line, launched with Holman & Pye's 1968 original, ran through Ed Dubois's 1980s redesigns and continued for decades afterward — the Centurion 57 won the European Yacht of the Year award in 2015, one of the brand's clearest instances of outside recognition. The Pilot Saloon line, introduced in 2000 by Berret-Racoupeau, built Wauquiez's reputation for raised-saloon passagemakers and carried the yard through its most recent ownership changes. The Opium 39 and the 2024 flagship Wauquiez 55 mark Marc Lombard's more recent contribution to the range.
Who Wauquiez is for
Wauquiez suits buyers drawn to a brand that has repeatedly chosen design pedigree and craftsmanship over scale — a lineage of named designers rather than an anonymous production line, built at a yard in France's north rather than the country's larger production boatbuilding clusters. That identity has survived several changes of ownership, and EXEL Industries' own stated goal after acquiring the brand — to help it "regain the DNA and dynamism" of its founders while staying premium — reflects how closely the company's current owners tie Wauquiez's value to that original character.
