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Meanwhile, Drummond
and New York City-based interior designer David Kleinberg saw to every
detail in the interior. “We didn’t want it to be about the fabrics
and the pattern and the color,” Kleinberg recalls, “but more
about the quality of the craftsmanship of the boat.”
They ripped out the
galley’s parquet floors and installed teak and mahogany. (“Sometimes
when you get a lot of teak and holly, it’s like too much chocolate,”
Drummond says.) They added a collapsible mahogany mast on the flying bridge.
They removed the boat’s heavily tinted windows. They added faux wainscoting
with mahogany accents in the pilothouse, where the formerly Formica helm
is now inlaid teak. For silver accents and vases, they used old family
sailing and tennis trophies.
Drummond did allow himself
a Sharp flat-panel TV in the saloon, but he’s thinking about covering
it with tambour doors. “It’s just too new-looking,” he
laments.
Drummond says his favorite
touches are in the master cabin aft, including varnished mahogany headboards
on the twin berths (“I sort of copied this from a Trumpy,” he
admits) and a unique light fixture. “The decorator kept sending those
mirrored rectangular lights you usually have in a bathroom or a bedroom,
but we made this box that covers the interior of the light, a three-sided
box with the light coming underneath. That was my idea, and it’s
one of the things that goes back to building it as if Mr. Huckins and
I had collaborated on the boat.”
About six months later,
Corisande VII set off as good as new. Better put, she was as good
as old.
She got lots of smiles
while doing The Great Loop last summer—and one snarl from a boater
in Alabama who called her “pretentious.” That guy probably wouldn’t
appreciate the original owner’s manual Drummond still keeps in the
pilothouse, or the feeling of satisfaction he has no matter where Corisande
VII ties up for the night.
“All the other
boats around us, they look like large pieces of plastic to me. They look
like boats you should iron something with,” Drummond says with a
smile. “And mine may be the least expensive boat on the dock.”
Huckins Yacht
Phone: (904) 389-1125. www.huckinsyacht.com.
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