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Marty Lowe is an interior designer and longtime IYG collaborator. She brings a sense of style and fun to her projects that is completely singular.
If you’ve spent any time at all with the Italian Yacht Group, or Italian yachts at large, you’re likely familiar with the name Marty Lowe. Marty is the brains behind her eponymous firm Marty Lowe Design, which is based in Fort Lauderdale. With decades of experience in the industry, she has brought her trademark laidback and beachy vibe to such builds as the 203-foot Sanlorenzo Alchemist and the 85-foot Sanlorenzo Sori Sanlorenzo. She is also currently working on a 180-foot Feadship with a repeat client.
Suffice to say, Lowe has some serious design chops. And those don’t come easy. (Though attending design school in Switzerland certainly helps.) She got to this lofty point in her career through hard-earned experience. She has collaborated with George Jousma for years, starting with Bertram and Azimut and working her way up the food chain to the elegant superyachts she plies her trade on today.
But it’s not all work with Marty—quite the opposite in fact. “Designing a boat with me is all about having fun,” she says with a laugh. “We are putting together the interior of a yacht. This should be an extremely enjoyable experience for the client. I want them to relax and be creative and pick out the design for a real home on the sea that expresses who they really are. And I can tell you for sure that we are going to have some good laughs in the process.” As an example of the fun she and her clients have, she points to one repeat client where the wife is an avid (and talented) piano player. She practices onboard her boat with a keyboard, and Marty is designing a very chic stool expressly for rehearsals.
George Jousma sees the joy Marty sparks in her clients all the time. “One of the reasons we at IYG love working with Marty is because the clients so obviously love working with her,” he says. “She creates this atmosphere of like ‘OK we are going to design this awesome boat. I’m going to be here every step of the way with you, and it’s going to be a blast.’ That’s a real talent that can’t be taught, and it keeps her clients not only happy, but coming back to her in the future.”
Indeed, many of Marty’s clients are repeats. Some—like the owner of the previously mentioned Feadship—are on their fourth Marty Lowe Design. Marty says one of the main reasons people return to her with their business is because she fosters a sense of trust with them. “When I work with a client, I take meticulous notes and thoroughly communicate them to the shipyard,” she says. “Look, my clients are rich and eccentric and sometimes they make unusual requests. You might get pushback from the yard because it’s not what they had in mind, but I haven’t screwed up a client request yet! And that’s why they come back to me. They know I’m going to get things done how them want them done, and done correctly, too I might add.”
Marty is a big believer in style. She wants to make sure that her clients’ personalities shine through in each and every project. That’s one reason she enjoys working with IYG so much. Boomer, George, and the gang fully understand that at the end of the day the client is in charge, as they will be the ones using the boat. Marty and IYG are dedicated to working together to make sure the client gets the yacht of their dreams.
“I want people to have gorgeous interiors that they can really live in,” she says with palpable enthusiasm. “At the end of the day with yacht design, we need to remember that a boat is a place to play on the water. We need to keep it breezy, and we need to keep it fun.” And with a designer like Marty at the helm, that’s exactly what IYG clients can expect.
