I read about the Philippe Starck yacht that’s been docked here in Barbados this week on Barbados artist Corrie Scott’s blog … she saw it, snapped some photos, and described it on her site Caribbean Serendipity as ship/yacht/submarine.  When she Googled “luxury boat that looks like a submarine,” Corrie learned details from a site called Luxury Property Blog.

Look at this thing!  Don’t tell me size doesn’t matter.  Good grief; this floating island is to boats what 64-ounce cups are to soda. Not that I don’t find it beautiful; I actually do. It’s just so … obscenely … big.

Visiting Barbados: The Philippe Starck "Size Matters" yacht. (Photo links to Luxury Real Estate blog, where I borrowed this photo with permission, copyright Mark Knowles.)

Here’s the scoop:

- Designed by Phillipe Starck, French designer who sees the potential beauty of everyday items and has designed everything from furniture to fly swatters.  Never mind this stunning (to me, anyway) space-age yacht; I would be delighted to own the Philippe Starck juicer that one of the 42 staffmembers aboard probably uses to squeeze juice in the morning.

- It’s owned by Russian billionaire Andrey Melnichenko.

- The name of the yacht is A (as in “fuckin’ A”?).

- It was built by the German ship-building company Blohm + Voss.

- It’s 118 meters long, has 3 swimming pools and 5 guest suites.

- It may have cost 150 million Euros to build, although who’s counting, a classic case of “If you have to ask …”

- The fuel tank holds 757,000 liters of the diesel fuel required to run it; “fill ‘er up” would run around $1.4 million US and run the boat for around 15 days at cruising speed.

A photo Corrie took gives a good idea of how massive this floating giant is relative to the people on it:

Corrie Scott photo; used with permission. Those specks are actually people - people enjoying Barbados' beauty and beautiful climate.

And that’s how the other .000000000000001 percent live.

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