THE PORTRAIT by✦YACHTLLYWOOD

Kelly Behun

What happens when one of America’s most celebrated residential designers steps into the world of superyachts?

Kelly Behun has spent her career shaping private homes that feel considered rather than staged, personal rather than performed. Her path to that reputation did not begin in yachting, and it did not begin in design school. She studied at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, then joined Ian Schrager’s studio, working alongside Philippe Starck and Anda Andrei during a period that shaped some of the most influential hotel interiors of the era. It was there she learned what a space does to the person standing inside it, and how much of that effect has nothing to do with scale.

In 2001, she founded Kelly Behun Studio in New York. The practice has since built private residences, furniture, and collaborations recognised on the AD100 list and ELLE Decor’s A-List, developing a way of working defined less by a fixed aesthetic than by a consistent intention. Sculptural forms, natural materials, contemporary art, restraint.

The result of that collaboration is LIV LOVE, a 41-metre Benetti Oasis, her interiors developed alongside Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture on a platform originally shaped with RWD. Behun did not approach the project as yacht design. She approached it the way she approaches any home, asking not how the space should look, but how someone would actually want to live inside it.

The materials tell that story before anything else does. Teak decking carried in from the exterior, continuing underfoot rather than stopping at the threshold. Timber panelling, stone, leather, linen, textures chosen to be touched rather than admired from a distance. A glossy white lacquer, produced by a piano factory, applied not for shine but for what it does quietly, catching the sky and the water and folding them back into the room. Nothing performs. Everything answers to the sea around it.

Speaking to Wallpaper* about the project, Behun described her intention directly.

“To create spaces that feel lived-in rather than overtly luxurious.”

It is the same philosophy that has run through her work from the beginning, applied here to an environment that has rarely been asked to hold it. Comfort before grandeur. Authenticity before spectacle.

Her arrival reflects a shift already underway across the industry. Life on board is becoming less formal, more personal, closer in spirit to how owners actually live on land. What they are asking for now is not distance from home, but continuity with it.

Perhaps this is why her presence in yachting carries weight. The most meaningful shifts rarely come from within an industry’s own conventions. They come from those willing to ask why the convention exists at all. By bringing the language of residential design to sea, Behun suggests that what defines a space has less to do with craftsmanship or size, and more to do with how it makes someone feel.

Her first step into this world is not simply the introduction of a new name. It is a sign of where the category is heading. Toward interiors that feel less designed and more inhabited.

Kelly Behun is the founder of Kelly Behun Studio, New York, and interior designer of LIV LOVE, the 41-metre Benetti Oasis, developed in collaboration with Bonetti/Kozerski Architecture.

(IMAGE COURTESY by THOMAS LOOF for WALLPAPER Mag)