Art Aboard

For art fans and bauble fanciers, finding an exclusive venue where they can add to their collections adds to the excitement. Early next year, that opportunity will present itself in nautical fashion: The 228-foot Grand Luxe-a cruiser with a Neapolitan connection-will glide into port with a boatload of gallery goodies. Not everyone will have access to the ultra-high-end goods on board the $20 million mega-yacht, however. Admission is by invitation only, and the ports of call are a carefully chosen roster of 34 where the money crowd plays.

Naples residents David and Lee Ann Lester are launching their SeaFair project "softly" in Miami in December and officially in January 2007 with a four-stop tour along Florida's Platinum Coast that targets Naples at the end of the month.

Their plan for a floating merchandise mall was hatched when they spent 18 months cruising on the Fortunata, their 94-foot Ferretti motor yacht. "Wherever we docked, we saw yachts bigger than ours filled with people who like to acquire the things we used to help sell," David recalls. "We thought it was a shame that those things were sitting in shops and galleries in New York or Paris or Rome and not where these potential buyers were."

Thus was born the concept for a marine mart-a venue for dealers to take fine art, jewelry, antiques and other luxuries to people who can afford to buy them at places they like to be. Lester, looking more like an affable history professor than an art-fair czar, reports that 26 galleries will display merchandise along with a French restaurant, an open-air Italian bistro and a caviar-and-champagne bar.

Invited guests will come aboard for a brunch, lunch, tea, cocktails or dinner and dancing, as well as lectures and gallery tours of the lavish merchandise.

"Many galleries are situated in resort areas and have to do all their business during their season," Lester observes. "In this day and age, that's not necessarily the best way to do business. We wanted to create a marketplace that would be viable during all seasons and could attract summer vacationers in the North and winter residents in the South."

Among the planned destinations: Boston, Martha's Vineyard, The Hamptons, Washing­ton, D.C., Charleston, S.C., Palm Beach, Tampa and Sarasota.

The Lesters are no strangers to the ins and outs of the art world. They opened the first of their four Los Angeles galleries in a 12-by-16-foot space in tony Brentwood in the 1970s. "We didn't know much back then," David, a 62-year-old University of Pennsylvania Law School graduate, says with a wry smile.

Although both had other jobs (he in law, she as an industrial psychologist, marketing consultant and hospital administrator), the Lesters thought they'd enjoy running art galleries as a sideline. But they didn't anticipate two things: how good they would be at running galleries and how much they would enjoy doing it. They set their sights on Chicago and arranged a fair in 1990 in partnership with a large communications firm. But that company went under, and its buyer walked away from art fair operations. The Chicago fair was, according to Lester, "a critical success and a financial disaster.

"It takes a year to prepare for a five-day fair, and three things are essential," Lester says. "You have to have the right dealers, the right operation, the right promotion. Fall down on any one, and you're dead."

The Lesters were wiser about all three when they started Art Miami in 1991 and embarked on establishing a global empire of art fairs that were eventually sold to two different buyers for a total of $22 million.

Now what to do? Sell the house in Stuart, buy a yacht and cruise for the next 18 months, which is when the floating-mall concept came to be.

A seaboard venue was not the only consideration. "We needed to create an exciting, sexy buying experience for clients," Lester says. "Buyers in this league have done the galleries and fairs over and over. We set out to deliver something totally different, a buying opportunity coupled with a first-class social experience that could be a gourmet dinner or with a gala benefit for a local museum or charity."

Charting a new course, however, is not always smooth sailing, the couple discovered. "First we looked into converting an existing yacht, but we soon realized we'd have to start from scratch," Lester says. "The initial, original design we commissioned turned dealers and financiers totally off. The second one was better, but not good enough."

Miami yacht designer Luiz De Basto got it right with his five-deck, 1,800-ton shoppers' paradise that is 54 feet high and 46 feet wide. "There were two problems with the earlier approach," he recalls. "The overall design had a boxy look that was not aesthetically pleasing. And the plan had too many windows. This is not a conventional dinner ship where everyone needs a view, but a gallery ship, where wall space is critical."

The winning yacht has a sleeker and more solid profile than its predecessors. (De Basto hastens to explain that the solid sector where the logo appears can later be reversed to window space.) Dealers will pay to wine and dine their invited guests, as will corporate clients who realize the potential of this new way to entertain prized customers.

De Basto says he has made sure that the requisite neutral look of the gallery space is balanced by glamorous foyers fitted with mahogany and marble and a Cordon Bleu-quality restaurant made bedazzling by lavish use of glass. The native Brazilian says his biggest challenge in designing the interior was creating traveling space for the permanent operations crew and temporary serving crew that would be out of view of the guests and sealed off from the galleries.

Lester admits it was easier to conceive the Grande Luxe than to execute it. Its design, a collaboration by the Lesters, De Basto and Jacksonville naval architects DeJong & Lebet, constantly evolved. "The Lesters brought a lot to the table," De Basto reports. "They know a lot about the business and they know what the dealers want and what the public wants. Their input was very important to the project."

Almost as daunting was compliance with the U.S. Coast Guard specifications. "Maritime regulations are extremely tough," Lester notes. Fire safety regulations affected the choice of every design component. De Basto notes that the common spaces will be geared for maximum eye appeal, but individual galleries are designed to be adaptable to the preferences of the 26 dealers who will exhibit.

Those dealers will rent space for a month at a time, which usually will take the ship to five destinations, Lester reports. They'll live ashore and commute to the yacht via minivans provided by SeaFair, which are also handy for delivering art to clients or consulting with them at their homes. When a fair concludes, the dealers will drive their vans to the next port. No one will live aboard except the 10-person crew. At $50 per square foot, the yacht's 11,000 square feet of rental space is comparable to conventional fair rental space. But, Lester points out, the percentage of potential buyers who visit will be considerably higher than a fair's typical audience.

Art specialists seem to agree. Evelyn Aimis, of Miami's Evelyn Aimis Fine Art, calls SeaFair a "brilliant idea," and Michael Cohen, of Cohen & Cohen, London, compliments the couple for getting the gallery to the client rather than getting the client to the gallery. By November 2005, the Platinum Coast sector of the tour was already oversubscribed, Lester reports, and dealers had rented 60 percent of the space on other legs of the journey.

Luring dealers required a different pitch because the concept was so novel. The Lesters created an on-line movie and DVD that was vital to their effort.

Financed by CAT Financial Services Corp., the Lesters chose Nichols Brothers Boat Builders Inc. of Freeland, Wash., to do the construction. Key to the design of the vessel is its lighter weight. "The Grand Luxe can be docked at many attractive ports with relatively shallow waters," says Bryan O. Nichols, president of the firm. Nichols says his company is used to building one-of-a-kind vessels, but certain unusual combinations of technology are aboard the Grand Luxe. "We've installed three thrusters in the yacht," he explains. "There will be one in the stern and two in the bow so that the captain will have excellent maneuverability."

The yacht, he says, will also carry self-contained pilings. After docking, the onboard pilings are put into place so wave action won't cause damage to the yacht or the stationary dock.

Although Lester estimates that the operating costs of the Grand Luxe will be $40 million over the next five years, SeaFair is just the beginning for the company, called Expoships.

Along with partners Robert D. Greene and Michael A. Hoberman, the Lesters envision five floating yacht-malls, each with different themes. "We could do one with just Italian products," Lester says. "Furnishings, motorcycles, fashions, all from the best Italian sources. Or we could do one with just couture fashion."