Steve Quigley

Managing Director & Principal Naval Architect, One2three Naval Architects, Sydney, Australia

Steve Quigley is the Founder and Principal Naval Architect of One2three Naval Architects in Sydney, Australia. He is an award winning naval architect who has been practicing since 1984 and founded his own design studio as Quigley Marine Designs in 1997; it became One2three Naval Architects in 2005. The company has recently been acquired and is now part of the BMT Group. From a studio in the 1901 Cooperage building on Sydney Harbour, Steve leads a team of eighteen naval architects and designers who have delivered more than 300 vessels to owners and operators in over 30 countries — high-speed aluminium ferries, defence and commercial craft, and superyachts. The studio is known internationally for its multihull work, including White Rabbit, the largest trimaran motoryacht in the world, and Triumphant, a 55-metre, 40-knot trimaran ferry. A graduate in naval architecture from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Steve takes an engineering-led approach: hull form, weight and hydrodynamics come first, with CFD, tank testing and full 3D production modelling used to prove a design long before a plate is cut. Four decades in high-speed commercial craft — where every kilogram and every knot is measured and paid for — underpin how he approaches yacht design. Electric and hybrid propulsion has become a defining strand of the studio’s work, commencing in a small way on Sydney Harbour with Australia’s first fully electric commuter ferry and expanding in recent years to the River Thames in London. One2three designed the 38-metre Hunt Class Mark 4 series of four vessels for Uber Boat by Thames Clippers, 182-passenger commuter vessels able to run at 28 knots on diesel or at 12 knots on electric power with zero emissions, and configured for a future conversion to hydrogen. That programme has since extended to fully electric passenger and freight vessels for Thames Clippers, and to the zero-emission ferries recently launched for Tower of London River Cruises, being the UK’s first fully electric tour boat, built by Pendennis in Cornwall. Steve’s interest in this work is practical rather than promotional: these are vessels that must hold a commercial timetable every day of the year, and they are demonstrating that the engineering and the economics of electric and hybrid vessels now stand up. He is also a lifelong sailor, and much of that engineering instinct was learned on the water rather than at a desk. He started in Herons at the age of five alongside his father, campaigned an Olympic 470, and won world championships in 18-foot skiffs and Mumm 30 classes. He has raced the Sydney to Hobart aboard the maxi Wild Oats XI seven times, taking four line honours wins and two overall handicap victories. He is equally deliberate about how the practice is run, having built One2three around close collaboration, inclusivity and neurodiversity, with the stated aim of being “a great company, not a big one.”

Q&A

1. What does it mean to you to be an ISS judge?

It’s a real privilege, and not one I take lightly. I’ve spent more than forty years designing vessels that simply have to work — ferries running eighteen hours a day, defence craft, yachts crossing oceans. So, I come to the table asking whether a design actually does what it set out to do, not just whether it photographs well.

The ISS panel brings together people who see this industry from very different angles: stylists, builders, brokers, engineers. Being asked for a considered opinion alongside them on the year’s best work is humbling. I also see it as a chance to bring an Australian and Asia-Pacific perspective to a judging table that has historically looked mostly to Europe and the United States.

2. What do you like about the ISS Design & Awards Gala?

It’s one of the few nights where the entire industry stands in the same room — the yards, the designers, the owners’ representatives, the crew — and acknowledges that a great yacht is never one person’s work. I like that it recognises the entire project scope from the initial design sketches through to the finished product and importantly the people behind the boat, not only the boat.

I also appreciate that the ISS looks beyond size and spend. Recognition for innovation in particular, for excellence in engineering, and for the quality of an idea well executed, is what matters enormously to a design studio like ours.

3. How did you get your start in the yachting industry?

I was thrust onto the water, well before I had any idea it could be a career. My father put me in a Heron as his crew when I was five and I’ve barely been off a boat since. From there it was an Olympic 470 campaign, then 18-foot skiffs — I was lucky enough to win a world championship in those — and later I had the privilege of joining the successful Wild Oats team sailing offshore maxi yachts. I’ve raced the Sydney to Hobart aboard Wild Oats XI, with four line honours wins and two overall handicap victories along the way.

What hooked me was never only the racing. It was the mechanics of it: why one hull came alive under you and another felt like hard work; why a skiff would light up at a particular angle and load; what the water was actually doing back there. You learn a great deal about hydrodynamics when sailing offshore for days in a breeze, and it is accumulated knowledge you can’t really get any other way.

That curiosity took me to the University of New South Wales here in Sydney to study naval architecture, and I began practising in 1984 in commercial and high-speed craft. It’s unforgiving training — every kilogram and every knot is measured, costed and debated. When yacht projects began coming our way we brought that discipline with us, and it turned out to be exactly what the more ambitious owners were after. White Rabbit came out of that: a trimaran at a scale nobody had attempted, which we could only take on because we’d already spent years proving multihull platforms in hard commercial service. Both White Rabbit’s were launched within a couple of hundred kilograms of their predicted displacement and exceeded their performance specifications which is an achievement our entire design and shipyard teams share and are extremely proud of.

4. What is your biggest challenge?

Convincing the market that efficiency is design, not an add-on.

There’s still a tendency to settle the styling first and then hand it to the engineers to make it float and go fast. By that point most of the decisions that matter have already been made for you. Hull form, construction materials, weight, propulsion match, the shape of the underwater body — those have to be on the table on day one, sitting alongside the exterior lines rather than following them. Collaboration with all parties including the owners and stylists is the key to a successful outcome.

When a project is run that way the results are dramatic, and the owner feels it every day in range, motion and running costs. But it takes a client and a yard willing to let the naval architect into the room early, and an exterior designer secure enough to have that conversation and make the appropriate compromises. Shifting that habit, project by project, is the challenge I keep coming back to.

5. If you could choose one location for your next travel adventure, where would you go and why?

Mine isn’t a coastline, which may be a first for this panel. My wife Tarnia and I have entered the Shitbox Rally in winter 2027, driving through the Australian outback from Cairns to Darwin — an Australian charity event where teams drive cars worth less than $1,500 across some of the roughest country on the continent to raise money for cancer research.

So, the next adventure is right across the top of Australia, in a car that has no business being there a 1972 Mercedes 200D. I like that it strips everything back: no support crew, no comfort, an unreliable machine, a very long way to go, and a very good reason to get there. After a career spent making vessels as efficient and dependable as possible, there’s something appealing about doing the exact opposite for a cause that has touched us and almost every family I know.

https://www.shitboxrally.com.au/

6. Where do you find inspiration? Why?

In the water itself. Being in and on the water is central to my existence. Hydrodynamics is where I keep going back, because the problems are genuinely hard and nature has already solved most of them. How a wave forms and collapses, how wash behaves behind a hull, how fast marine animals move with so little apparent effort — there is more instruction in that than in any styling trend.

Practically, it means we spend a great deal of time in the virtual CFD world and in the tank, watching what water actually does rather than what we assumed it would. Our trimaran work came directly from that. Chasing low resistance and low wash led us to a platform that also turned out to be extraordinarily comfortable in a seaway and abundantly generous in volume. The best ideas we’ve had all began as an engineering question, not an aesthetic one — and they ended up looking better for it.

7. What do you see are upcoming trends in the industry?

Three, I think.

Efficiency becoming the headline number. Owners are starting to ask about range, fuel burn and emissions the way they used to ask about top speed. That pushes us towards lighter but more robust structures, better hull forms and hybrid or diesel-electric propulsion, and it favours designers who can prove performance rather than promise it. Electric and Hybrid propulsion systems are now proven products within limited boundaries. We have experienced significant learnings on our commercial projects in relation to equipment, integration and achievable expectations matching outcomes and the associated compromises to now confidently offer viable electric virtual gen sets and main propulsion units that achieve real environment savings.

Alternative platforms going mainstream. Multihulls were considered unconventional for yachts twenty years ago. They deliver more usable volume, less motion and lower resistance for the same power. As owners spend longer aboard and travel further from the marina, that efficiency arithmetic becomes very hard to ignore as do the environmental savings.

Design validated before it is built. Digital tooling has moved far enough that we can now model, analyse and effectively sea-trial a vessel before any material is ordered. The leaps in technology and the evolution of design tools over the course of my career have been incredible and a real joy to experience. That takes risk out for the yard and the owner, and — more interesting to me — it lets designers be braver, because the unknowns are so much smaller than they were. Ai is a whole new frontier that we are exploring on many levels and the future looks very exciting.