Meet the superyacht owner who designs yacht interiors for a living

It’s a rare thing to know what you want to do with your life from a young age – but for Mike Fisher – there was never any question; design was where his passions lay. “I was the geeky kid who was always playing with Lego and building things, the boy who constructed all the dens and the treehouses,” he says. “To be honest, it was the only thing I was good at!”

Fisher went to architecture school and then completed a masters in urban design before starting work as a commercial architect. “I was designing left, right and centre – everything from hospitals and houses to offices and galleries – it was good fun,” says Fisher. He quickly climbed the ranks – becoming one of the company’s principal designers, but was slowly realising that he wanted to have more control and to steer the ship he was sailing – or at least designing. He set about going out on his own.

“I realised that if I wanted more pulling power in terms of how things looked inside and out, I was going to need to learn interior design too. So I teamed up with Ngila Boyd who taught me everything I know.” Studio Indigo was born.

The first yachting project

That was 2005 and Fisher hasn’t looked back – or had time to. The studio started out specialising in high-end residential projects and from there more work came flying in from happy customer after happy customer. “It was that classic set up; you start working with people and they like what you do, so then they ask you to design their chalet, their boat and whatever else. It evolves.”

Unusually, Fisher is a superyacht owner himself – which meant he could flex his design muscles on his own yacht before testing the water with anyone else’s. “Obviously, when we did our first yacht we didn’t know what we were doing, but because of that we created something new and different and challenged the status quo,” says Fisher. “We brought naivety to the process which actually acted as a positive thing.”

More superyachts followed his own – including Joy and Botti. “Joy was a huge leap of faith on the client’s part,” says Fisher, “but he wanted a boat that was different to everything else out there and he thought the best way to achieve that was to go outside the usual group of yacht designers. Even today, a lot of our clients come to us because the work we do is so different.”

Today, a few yachts after that inaugural project, Fisher owns Brigadoon – an award-winning superyacht built by Dutch builders Moonen. “Obviously that naivety we once had has evolved,” says Fisher, a nod to the multiple yachts the studio has worked on since the early days. But the company’s mission still stands. “We want our clients to walk onto their boat every single day and say ‘wow, am I not just the luckiest person in the world?’”

For Fisher, that meant designing a boat that was practical and comfortable with plenty of texture and colour. “I didn’t want anything too precious – people are covered in oil and sand on yachts and I didn’t want to go around telling people ‘don’t do this or don’t do that.’ I have three dogs on board as well so it has to be relaxed.” The end result was perfect. “Each time you sit down in any of the spaces it still sings to you which I think is really important. When we’re designing for other clients, that‘s what we want to achieve too.”

Listening, learning and making friends for life

The process for those other clients centres around listening. “I always remind people that we have one mouth and two ears, so we should listen twice as much as we speak,” says Fisher. “It’s also about listening to what they didn’t say – clients often find it difficult to vocalise what it is that they want so it’s our job to fill in the blanks. They’ve only known what they’ve seen before – what we try to do is create something new and different.”

It’s perhaps unsurprising that amidst all this intense communication between designer and owner, that friendships are often forged. “You become very intimate and close to your clients,” says Fisher. “You know their secrets – you know what side of the bed they sleep on, you know what their children are like. Generally we remain close with all of them.” In fact, Fisher has just returned from Sydney where he’s starting a project with an old client. “It was a great trip and they were absolute fun to be with – to the point that I sometimes forgot I was there for work.”

With work feeling so much like fun and with his own yachts to draw on for experience – it’s little wonder that Fisher’s designs strike such a chord with his customers. As for his favourite yachting project to date? Impossible to answer. “For a moment in time, every project is our favourite. We put so much sweat and hard work into each one. So they are all exciting. Every single one.”