Nautor's Swan

Nautor builds sailing yachts in Pietarsaari, Finland, on the 63rd parallel, and has done since 1966, when Pekka Koskenkylä set out to build fibreglass boats to a standard nobody thought fibreglass deserved. The first thousand or so hulls were drawn by Sparkman & Stephens and made "Swan" a synonym for the best series-built sailing yacht money could buy. In 1981 the yard placed its bet on a young Argentine named German Frers; that partnership is now in its fifth decade and has produced over seven hundred yachts. Leonardo Ferragamo owned the yard from 1998 (his own first yacht was a Swan 51), and in 2025 Nautor's sale to Sanlorenzo was announced. The boats in these dossiers predate all of that: they come from the Finnish decades, built one standard at a time.