The Vision – How Light As A Material Shaped the Wider Yachts 72m Aetherius
Starting from a proven platform
When Wider Yachts invited Phathom to develop Aetherius, the brief began with their existing 72-metre technical platform, its structure, bulkheads, technical spaces, and crew routes already fixed. That’s a very different starting point to a blank sheet: every idea had to be tested against what was already there before it could be tested against what guests would feel. The open question wasn’t engineering, it was experience, working within those constraints to design an interior around light itself, treating it not as a finishing touch applied at the end, but as a primary material, on the same footing as stone, timber, or metal.
The team started by studying how light actually moves through a yacht across a day, and how conventional interiors tend to work against it, closing spaces off deck by deck rather than letting daylight travel through them. That observation shaped the entire design language: an exterior defined by bow-to-stern glazing and a muscular, architecturally-inspired silhouette, and an interior built on dynamic asymmetry and double-height guest areas, breaking larger formal spaces into smaller, convivial zones so that light, and the sightlines that carry it, could move freely between them.
The Design Decisions – How Light As A Material Shaped the Wider Yachts 72m Aetherius
Light that breathes with the day
The Club ‘Beach’ has always been a defining feature across Wider’s range, so on Aetherius it couldn’t just be included, it had to become the clearest expression of the light-as-material approach. Beach clubs are, by nature, tucked low into the stern, a confined volume that typically has to fight for natural light. The team’s answer was a slatted, louvered roof over the pool that can open entirely to let the sun flood straight in, angle to filter and soften it, or close fully in poor weather, turning what could have been a fixed condition into a space that reads differently, and admits a different quality of light, in every configuration. On either side, cabanas fold open to the sea, and a sloped, simulated-sand beach unfolds from the transom itself, extending the club past the hull line and blurring the edge between yacht and shoreline.
Overhead, a second layer of light panels runs continuously throughout the day, mirroring the exact colour temperature and intensity of the sky outside, warmer and dimmer toward evening, cooler and brighter at midday, regardless of whether the louvres above are open, angled, or fully closed. This wasn’t designed as a fallback for when the roof shuts out the sun, it’s a constant, an uninterrupted simulated extension of the sky itself. Guests using the infinity pool, gym, sauna, or chill lounge register the same continuous passage of the day the way they would on an open shoreline, a direct application of human-centric, circadian-responsive lighting, always in step with guests’ own biological rhythm.
Two decks higher, the same thinking takes a different form. The ceiling of the upper deck lounge is built from intelligent LED panels capable of projecting live graphics rather than fixed light, from the subtle ripple of water caustics to a full cinema mode, extending a projected film’s imagery beyond the screen and across the entire ceiling plane. Across all three spaces, the surface above guests’ heads stops being a passive finish. It becomes structure, light source, and canvas, all at once.
Life on Board & The Result – How Light As A Material Shaped the Wider Yachts 72m Aetherius
Architecture built to let light travel
Aetherius’s oversized, bow-to-stern glazing and double-height cutouts weren’t drawn for visual drama alone, they exist to let daylight penetrate multiple levels at once, cascading from the upper decks down into the social spaces below rather than stopping at the first ceiling it meets. That vertical continuity reduces the psychological separation between inside and outside, and it shaped material choices throughout the interior: stone, timber, and brushed metal selected in part for how they catch, diffuse, and carry that light through the space across the day.
Since its unveiling at the Monaco Yacht Show in September 2024, Aetherius has drawn attention for how far an established technical platform can be pushed toward genuine experience design. Built on the same 72-metre platform underpinning other Wider models, it became something of a proof of concept, that treating light as a material, deliberately and throughout, changes the answer to what a superyacht interior can feel like. It’s a way of thinking that continues to inform how Phathom approaches every project since.
Ultimately, the Majesty 100 Terrace isn’t defined by a single spatial idea, but by consistent attention to how people move, pause, and connect within it. One year after its debut at DIBS 2025 and following its European premiere in Cannes, the market’s response has been clear: with three units already delivered and the fourth one already sold, the Majesty 100 Terrace is on track not only to surpass its predecessor’s sales record, but to set a new benchmark for the Majesty brand, a position reinforced by multiple international awards since its launch.
