Allures 51.9Review & Buyer’s Guide: The Aluminium Flagship for the Long Way Round
In plain terms
The Allures 51.9 is a 16.7-metre aluminium sailing yacht built for a couple or a family to take around the world. Three things to understand before anything else.
The hull is metal; the deck is not. The bottom of the boat is welded from marine-grade aluminium, the same family of material as the workboats of the North — rocks and ice worry it far less than they worry fiberglass. The deck and coachroof, though, are composite, like an ordinary yacht’s: lighter up high, never needing paint, and insulating by construction. This is the Allures signature — and, as we’ll see, also the one question the brand has never had answered independently.
There is no keel in the usual sense. Instead, a lifting centreboard. Board up, she draws 1.34 metres: into the lagoon of an atoll, onto the sand on a falling tide. Board down, 2.92 metres, and she goes to windward like a proper yacht. The ballast stays fixed in the hull, not in the board — stability doesn’t depend on where the board is.
This is the yard’s flagship and its most expensive boat. New, she runs toward a million euros with options; used, from €1,350,000 — and there are roughly two for sale on the entire planet. Buying an Allures 51.9 almost always means ordering new and joining a queue, not finding a listing.
The boat they named too modestly
The name lies. “51.9” sounds like a facelift of the Allures 51. It isn’t. Yachting World’s Rupert Holmes and Toby Hodges warned buyers off the arithmetic in 2021: don’t be deceived by the name — with maximum beam only 12 centimetres greater, she carries a much longer waterline and far more powerful broad stern sections, and is effectively a much larger boat than the previous Allures 51 and 52.
It was also a deliberate step upmarket. Bateaux.com read the move plainly:
“Avec le 51.9, un nouveau cap est franchi, car ce voilier est assurément plus haut de gamme que le reste de la gamme... Nul doute que le chantier veut attaquer la concurrence comme Amel ou Hallberg Rassy.” (“With the 51.9 a new milestone is reached: this yacht is decidedly more upmarket than the rest of the range... No doubt the yard wants to attack competitors like Amel or Hallberg-Rassy.”)
Allures was founded in 2003 in Cherbourg by Stéphan Constance and Xavier Desmarest, and today belongs to the Grand Large Yachting group — the same house that builds Garcia and Outremer. The 51.9 is drawn by Berret-Racoupeau (Olivier Racoupeau), with interiors by Isabelle Racoupeau and Franck Darnet credited across the range. Hull #1 went into the water in May 2021.
The build itself is a tour of the group: the shaped aluminium hull is welded at Garcia’s Condé-sur-Noireau site, the composite deck moulded at Shoreteam in Colombelles, the furniture made by Griffon Marine, and everything comes together in Cherbourg.
Production is tiny, and the numbers are documented minimums, not estimates. Giornale della Vela, reporting from Düsseldorf in February 2023: the boat on display was hull number 4, the order list ran to 11 units, and a new order placed then would deliver in November 2025. No later count has been published. Hull #3 exists only in a sideways glimpse — the owner of hull #1 met “les 2 « frères » de Fou de Bassan, les numéros 2 et 3” (the two “brothers” of Fou de Bassan, numbers 2 and 3) in New Caledonia.
Verdict
What kind of boat is this — if you’re seeing her for the first time
The numbers: 16.67 metres overall on a 15.57-metre hull, 4.82 metres of beam, 18,400 kg light displacement (call it 22 tonnes loaded for a voyage), 5,900 kg of ballast fixed in the hull, 118.6 m² of working sail. Twin rudders. The centreboard is aluminium in an aluminium trunk, raised by a manual winch — no hydraulics, fewer things to fail. Early boats carry a Volvo Penta D3-110 (a 150 hp option existed) on a saildrive; the yard has since moved the whole range to Nanni engines, currently the N4-115 and N4-140. CE Design Category A, Ocean.
The cockpit runs to some six metres and is organised in three zones — an aft sunbed over the lazarette, a twin-wheel working zone, a forward guest zone — and every reviewer who has stepped into it has praised it without reservation. Below, the full-beam aft owner’s cabin is the thing her smaller sister, the 45.9, cannot offer. The engine room is walk-in; journalists made a point of the labelled cabling, piping and manifolds.
Insulation is 65 mm of foam in the deck sandwich. The base boat is optimised for the tropics; a thermal package for cold water is a paid option. Keep that in mind when the brochure shows Greenland.
Living with her: two first hulls, two oceans
The fates of the first two boats read like a designed experiment: hull #1 went around the world through the tropics, hull #2 went north up the Viking route. Between them they bracket the boat’s claimed range.
Fou de Bassan (hull #1) — Dominique and Véronique Chatelin, sailing the Grand Large Yachting World Odyssey 500 rally: out of Grenada on 3 February 2022, home to Brest on 2 July 2024. Véronique’s blog is the richest independent owner source on the model, and it doesn’t read like marketing.
Réunion to Richard’s Bay, South Africa: “Traversée relativement facile... nous avions fait 11kn de moyenne avec des vents de 30 à 35 kn! Et les vagues qui déferlaient sur le pont!” (“A relatively easy crossing... we averaged 11 knots in 30 to 35 knots of wind! With the waves breaking over the deck!”)
Leaving New Zealand in 30 knots: “Les fenêtres de la cuisine sont sous l’eau et je suis face à l’aquarium.” (“The galley windows are underwater and I’m looking into the aquarium.”)
Raiatea to Samoa, deep downwind: first the masthead spinnaker halyard block let go; then, in 20 knots, “c’est l’anneau d’attache du point d’écoute tribord qui s’arrache. Donc c’est terminé pour le Spi!” (“the starboard clew attachment ring tore out. So that’s it for the spinnaker!”) After which, she notes, “plus rien ne casse” — nothing else breaks. A separate entry records a mid-ocean engine failure without elaboration: “Dom réalise que nous n’avons pas de moteur!” (“Dom realises we have no engine!”)
The verdict after three years, from Dominique — published through the yard’s own channel, so read it as curated: “Je reprendrai le même! Ce bateau est super confortable, super sûr, plus facile à manier qu’un catamaran.” (“I’d take the same one again! This boat is supremely comfortable, supremely safe, easier to handle than a catamaran.”)
Castella (hull #2) — Markus Tanner, a career mariner and yacht consultant, and Marianne Daetwyler, from Switzerland. They took her up the Viking route: Cherbourg, Scotland, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, the Canadian Maritimes, down to Annapolis — some 4,000 miles, including weeks in Reykjavik waiting for the ice belt to shrink. Their previous boat is the telling detail: a Hallberg-Rassy 44, given up because, in Tanner’s words on a dealer blog, “uns war einfach das Mittelcockpit zu klein” (“the centre cockpit was simply too small for us”). They sea-trialled a Garcia 52 and chose the Allures: “Sie ist für eine Fahrtenyacht recht sportlich unterwegs. Wir segeln sie entspannt zu zweit, und auch Einhand kommt man gut klar.” (“For a cruising yacht she moves along quite sportily. We sail her relaxed as a couple, and single-handed works fine too.”)
The independent measurements come from the press. Herb McCormick of Cruising World sailed Castella on Chesapeake Bay in 14 to 16 knots: better than 8 effortless knots under code zero on a beam reach, the wheel firm, the motion gentle — “even stately”; hard on the wind under staysail, better than 6 knots through a 2-to-3-foot chop the boat “muscled through easily.” And below, “the silence — not a creak or moan to be heard.” Leigh Rose of Yachting News tested her off Cherbourg in 18 to 22 knots and saw her charging past 8.5 knots — no small thing, he noted, for a boat of 18.4 tonnes. But close-hauled he found her honest rather than sharp: “she wasn’t particularly high-winded, feeling most comfortable around 35-38° off the wind.” His conclusion is the kind money can’t buy: “Would I buy one? The strait answer is yes... She feels indestructible on the water.”
The yard claims routine daily runs of 180 to 200 miles. No independent log confirms the figure; the test consensus is a boat that lights up in a breeze and wants a code zero or asymmetric when the wind goes soft.
The juries agreed. Cruising World named her Best Full-Size Cruiser Over 45 Feet for 2025 — unanimously, with judge Mark Pillsbury calling her “this year’s dream boat” — and SAIL put her in its Top 10 Best Boats 2025.
The deck-joint question: a bet nobody has independently checked
The Allures signature — a composite deck glued and screwed onto an aluminium hull — is at once the brand’s best argument and its one unanswered question.
The case for it is straightforward: less weight up high, a deck that never needs paint, insulation built into the sandwich. Cruising World judge Tim Murphy accepted the logic at face value: “One trick was to put a composite deck on the aluminum hull because composite structures are able to keep paint longer.”
How the joint is actually made is where the sources part company, and we log both versions:
The aluminium and the GRP overlap by about 6 cm, “separated by a layer of glue that is adhered under pressure for two days, and screws every 2 to 3 cm further secure the fastening.”
The one-piece deck is bonded, held under pressure for 48 hours, then screwed from inside “avec une vis tous les 10 cm sur tout le pourtour” (“with a screw every 10 cm around the entire perimeter”), the bulwark reinforcing the junction.
Screws every 2–3 cm or every 10 cm — the two accounts don’t reconcile. A brokerage source (YachtClass) shrugs at the question entirely, calling the screws “more of a psychological dimension to reassure the owners as modern glues are so effective and resistant.”
Here is the honest state of the record. Not one failure of this joint is documented anywhere, on any Allures, in twenty years of the concept. But nearly every reassuring word about it comes from the yard, its dealers or friendly channels. The single independent owner voice we found concerns the smaller Allures 40 — its first hull, owned since 2005, whose owner wrote on Hisse-et-Oh that “la liaison composite / aluminium parfaitement étudiée, en font une coque quasi aussi rigide que si elle était totalement en alu” (“the composite/aluminium junction is perfectly worked out, making a hull almost as rigid as if it were entirely aluminium”). The scepticism that exists lives at the level of concept, not evidence: a Boat Design Net thread argues that mixing an alloy hull with a composite deck buys little over building the whole boat in aluminium. No independent surveyor’s audit of an ocean-worked joint has ever been published. The question stays open — not because anything has failed, but because nobody outside the family has checked.
And an adjacent silence: stability. Ballast is 5,900 kg on 18,400 kg — a ratio of about 32%. Her smaller sister, the 45.9, carries a Yachting Monthly-confirmed 37.9%. The angle of vanishing stability, STIX and righting-moment curve for the 51.9 have never been published anywhere. The only way to close that question with numbers is to request the ISO 12217-2 stability booklet from the yard during purchase. (Aggregators quote a 30% ballast ratio; that figure is derived, not primary.)
Buying a used Allures 51.9: what to check
From here on, this dossier switches to survey mode.
The aluminium rules apply in full — the boat’s youth buys no exemptions.
Hull potential first, before any talk of price
The rule of thumb from the Hisse-et-Oh aluminium threads: “il ne doit pas être supérieur à -800 mV, auquel cas il y a corrosion en cours” (“it must not read above −800 mV, in which case corrosion is already underway”) — and, from the same thread, “Au vu du coût d’une coque, cela ne se discute même pas” (“given what a hull like this costs, it isn’t even a discussion”).
Galvanic versus electrolytic
Allures’ own technical note draws the line between galvanic corrosion — dissimilar metals in seawater, answered by sacrificial anodes — and electrolytic corrosion from “un courant électrique accidentel (courant de fuite), provenant du bord ou du quai” (“an accidental electric current — a leakage current — from on board or from the dock”). Hunt for pitting, white powder or gel in the bilges and on the underwater hull; test for stray current from both the boat and the shore supply.
Copper-free antifouling only
The coating history belongs in the paperwork you ask for.
Anodes — a full audit, board included
The neighbouring Ovni class documents what happens when this goes wrong: “Les anodes avaient été mal posées et pendant quelques années elles ne s’attaquaient pas et la coque a pris des petits cratères” (“the anodes had been fitted wrongly, for years they didn’t erode — and the hull developed little craters”), an owner reported after board electrolysis.
Foreign metal in the hull
Any non-factory fastener a previous owner drove into aluminium “just for a minute” is the classic threat to every alloy hull. Tell the surveyor to hunt for all of it.
Then the 51.9’s own list
Walk the deck-to-hull joint around its entire perimeter: any movement, water tracking, fastener corrosion — no failures are documented, but no independent inspection method is either, which makes your surveyor’s eye worth more here than anywhere else on the boat. Inspect the centreboard trunk, pin, cable and winch: wear after years of service is a question with no public answer yet. The saildrive sits in an aluminium hull; no Allures-specific isolation discussion is documented, so it gets checked under the general rules. Ultrasonic thickness readings at 30 to 40 points, as on any aluminium hull. And the engine history in full: early boats Volvo, later boats Nanni — and hull #1’s log records a mid-ocean engine failure whose cause was never published.
Why the survey outweighs the forums here
The public defect record for this model is empty — no claims, no warranty stories, no corrosion cases, in French, German or English. The model’s own forum on bateaux.com carries the site’s shrug: “Pas encore de sujet sur ce forum” (“No topic on this forum yet”) — against seven registered owners. That is not proof of reliability. It is what a fleet of a dozen young, privately owned boats looks like: the crowd-sourced map of weak points that a 500-hull classic gives you for free will not exist here for another decade. Until it does, the survey is the entire risk control.
One journalistic complaint exists, and it isn’t a defect. Bateaux.com, on the first boat’s tall windscreen and freeboard: it “n’aidera pas le propriétaire pour ses manœuvres de port vu le fardage très important” (“won’t help the owner with harbour manoeuvres, given the very significant windage”). The 2025 model year reworked the hardtop into a rounder shape.
The 2025 revisions, for dating a boat: the rounded rigid hardtop; an in-boom furling option with a full-batten main gaining some 9 m² and positive roach; a carbon mast option to calm pitching; North Sails availability; a darker interior scheme alongside the light one; Nanni engines. A boat with the angular windscreen and a Volvo is an early hull.
Allures 51.9 price and market: two boats on Earth
The active worldwide used market, counted hull by hull: two boats. Both 2022, both in southern Spain, both asking €1,350,000.
One sits with GL Yachting — the Grand Large group’s own brokerage desk — in Estepona, wearing a “Price Drop” flag; it recurs on YachtWorld, fr.boats.com, Annonces du Bateau, Boatshop24 and Boot24, but that is one Boats Group data feed and one hull, not five boats. The second is with I. Castañer Yachts in San Roque, Cádiz, co-listed through Denison in Annapolis. A third boat — Anastasia, the yard’s hull #4, launched May 2023, 450 engine hours, watermaker, generator, solar — was asked at around €1.3–1.35M, but her trail leads to Turkey and out of the main feeds; her availability is uncertain. On AYC, Band of Boats, bateauavendre.fr, Scanboat and boot24.ch: zero listings. Documented sold prices: none exist.
The price anchors that do exist: the new-boat base was €706,860 ex-VAT in 2021 (Yachting World); an equipped 2021 configuration was quoted at €848,232 (ActuNautique); the 2023 test boat came to €978,420 ex-VAT as tested (Yachting Monthly). Base prices for 2022, 2024, 2025 and 2026 were never published — the yard has moved to price-on-application.
Read those numbers together and the market logic falls out on its own: a 2022 hull on the used market asks more than the fully-optioned 2023 test boat cost new. With eleven orders on the book by early 2023 and first availability then quoted as November 2025, scarcity is doing the pricing. You don’t shop for an Allures 51.9. You either join the queue in Cherbourg or you watch two listings in Andalusia and move fast.
Market snapshot: August 2026. This section is updated with each revision.
Allures 51.9 vs Garcia, Boréal and Ovni: what buyers actually compare
Garcia Exploration 52 is the nearest rival and a sibling: same group, same welders, same Cherbourg. All aluminium — hull and deck — heavier, more expedition-hardened, shaft drive where the Allures has a saildrive, plainer inside. The cleanest comparison on record is a purchase decision: the Castella crew sea-trialled a Garcia 52 and took the Allures for its cockpit and liveability. The Windpilot blog draws the family line simply: the group runs “two separate production lines... Allures for bluewater cruising all over the world – Garcia Exploration for extreme adventures up to and into the ice.”
Boréal 47.2 / 52. The YBW forum’s standing verdict, from the long-running “OVNI vs Garcia vs Boreal” thread: “Boreal and Allures are the stand-out contenders in aluminium centre-board long-term live-aboard yachts... Boreal has the advantage as a pure high latitude expedition yacht... Allures is more orientated to low latitude tropical/tradewind sailing (massive wide stern, twin wheels, twin vulnerable rudders, huge cockpit to fall out of) and performance sailing.”
Ovni 490 is the people’s route into the same idea: Alubat’s chined, flat-plate centreboarder — cheaper, plainer, with the fattest used market in the class. When Yachting World ran the smaller Allures 40.9 against an Ovni 400 head to head, it found the metalwork and electrics of both yards “beyond reproach,” adding that “the very high level of quality on both builds dispels any fears about the risk of electrolysis” — two very clearly differentiated personalities on equally sound foundations.
Allures 45.9 is the in-house alternative: the same recipe, no full-beam aft cabin, a lower price, and a notably higher ballast ratio at 37.9%.
Amel 50 and Hallberg-Rassy are the fiberglass targets the yard named when it moved the 51.9 upmarket — integrated-systems comfort against alloy and shoal draught. It says something that Castella’s owners arrived from a Hallberg-Rassy 44.
And the disambiguation that saves you money: the Allures 51 and 52 of 2009–2018 are different boats. Smaller, lighter, a generation older, and rightly much cheaper used. ActuNautique on the 51.9: “plus long, plus large et plus lourd que le précédent modèle” (“longer, wider and heavier than the previous model”). Don’t let a listing’s title do your thinking.
Open questions
This dossier doesn’t pretend to omniscience — and on a fleet this small, the honest list is long. Real day’s runs from ships’ logs (the 180–200-mile claim awaits independent numbers; the Fou de Bassan blog has episodes, not series). Centreboard trunk, cable, winch and pin wear after a circumnavigation. Actual anode consumption and any stray-current experience in warm, salty water. The deck-to-hull joint under an independent eye after years of ocean work. Storm behaviour beyond the owners’ episodes — twin-rudder control on a big following sea, lying to. Tropical ventilation as a system: hatches, airflow at anchor, condensation (the tropical blog entries are untroubled, but untested is not the same as good). Drying out on the plate in practice. Real annual maintenance budgets. Warranty experience with the yard. The hull count after early 2023. The stability booklet. And the story behind hull #1’s mid-ocean engine failure. Owner testimony will join the next revision as it surfaces.
Allures 51.9 specifications (2021–)
| Length overall | 16.67 m |
| Hull length | 15.57 m |
| Beam | 4.82 m |
| Draft (board up / down) | 1.34 / 2.92 m |
| Light displacement | 18,400 kg (~22 t loaded) |
| Ballast | 5,900 kg, fixed in hull (B/D ≈ 32%) |
| Sail area | 118.6 m² |
| Rudders | twin |
| Centreboard | aluminium, manual winch |
| Engine | Volvo Penta D3-110 (early) / Nanni N4-115, N4-140 (later); saildrive |
| Fuel / water | ~730 / ~620 L (as tested; 2×350 / 2×300 L in early documentation) |
| Construction | aluminium hull + composite deck (foam sandwich, 65 mm) |
| CE category | A (Ocean) |
| Built | minimum 4 hulls by early 2023; order book of 11 |
FAQ
How much does a used Allures 51.9 cost?
Around €1,350,000 for a 2022 hull — and there are roughly two for sale worldwide, both in southern Spain. The new-boat base price was €706,860 ex-VAT in 2021; the yard now quotes on application. There are no documented sold prices yet.
What are the known problems of the Allures 51.9?
There is no public defect record at all — no claims, corrosion cases or warranty stories in French, German or English sources. That reflects a young fleet of about a dozen privately owned boats, not proven reliability. The real risks are the generic aluminium ones: galvanic corrosion, foreign fasteners, anode neglect (including the board), stray current. A specialist survey matters more here than on almost any boat we cover.
What’s the difference between the Allures 51 and the 51.9?
They are different boats. The 51.9 (2021–) is substantially larger and heavier, with a longer waterline, powerful broad stern, twin rudders and a full-beam aft owner’s cabin. The Allures 51 and 52 of 2009–2018 are a smaller, older generation and sell for much less — check which boat a listing actually describes.
Allures 51.9 or Garcia Exploration 52?
Same group, same welders, opposite philosophies. Allures: composite deck, saildrive, huge cockpit, tropical/tradewind orientation and liveability. Garcia: all-aluminium, shaft drive, harder expedition focus up to the ice. The only documented head-to-head decision — Castella’s owners — went to the Allures for cockpit and comfort.
Is the Allures 51.9 suitable for high latitudes?
Hull #2 sailed Cherbourg to Greenland and on to Annapolis, waiting out the ice in Reykjavik — so yes, she can. But the base boat is insulated for the tropics; the cold-water thermal package is an option, and buyers whose plan is purely polar usually also test a Boréal or a Garcia.
Method: this dossier was assembled from the yard’s documentation, sea trials and reports by Yachting World, Yachting Monthly, Cruising World, Yachting News, Giornale della Vela, Bateaux.com and ActuNautique, the circumnavigation blog of Fou de Bassan, aluminium-practice threads on Hisse-et-Oh and YBW, and brokerage records 2021–2026. Quotes are preserved in French with translations, meaning intact. Several owner quotes reached print through the yard’s or dealers’ channels and are marked as such in the text. Where sources disagree — including on how the boat’s own deck is fastened — we left the conflict honestly open. Owner interviews are underway; their testimony will join the next revision.