Last week saw Dickie Bannenberg, the son of the late superyacht designer Jon Bannenberg, launch the book: ‘Jon Bannenberg: A Life of Design’, with a party at the Royal College of Art in London. The book provides a definitive review of his father’s design life, and includes drawings, sketches, photos, as well as letters, giving an unparalleled insight into the man who epitomised style for four decades.
The Book ‘Jon Bannenberg A Life of Design’ launched by Dickie Bannenberg
In 1965, the Cunard Line announced the list of interior designers to work on their as-yet-unnamed liner, under construction at the John Brown yard in Glasgow. Among the carefully selected team of the most celebrated British designers was the up-and-coming Jon Bannenberg. He was assigned the Double Room (the largest space then afloat), the Card Room, some of the First Class Suites and a swimming pool. The QE2, as she was christened by The Queen in 1967, marked Bannenberg’s first, but typically confident, steps along a design journey that lasted over forty years, during which he designed many of the most admired and famous yachts on the seas.
Fifty years on, 13 years after Jon’s death in 2002, his son Dickie chronicles that remarkable design journey, not least for the fact that a man who had no formal design training created his own profession. He was the first to bring together what were, until the mid-1960s, three separate disciplines – naval architecture, exterior design and interior design.
Bannenberg was appointed a Royal Designer for Industry in 1978 – the first yacht designer to be so honoured since the famous Charles Nicholson in 1934. Called by one observer ‘the Le Corbusier of yacht design’, Bannenberg created an entire fleet of iconic yachts over his four-decade career, including Carinthia VI for the German magnate Helmut Horten; Nabila for Adnan Khashoggi; MY Gails I, II and III for Gerald Ronson; charter yacht Talitha (ex Talitha G) for J Paul Getty Jr; and the 132 metre mega yacht Rising Sun for Larry Ellison, the delivery of which Bannenberg did not live to see.
A launch party at the Royal College of Art in London
Jon Bannenberg trained at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. He left Australia in the mid-50s and moved to London, working in fine art through to the end of the decade. Through the Swinging Sixties and onwards, his designs for yachts and houses, cars and planes, took him all over the world via Greece, France, Italy, Holland, Germany, the United States and, ultimately, a return to his Australian roots.
He designed for the rich, the super rich, the great, the good and the not-so-good: for dictators and captains of industry. He even designed a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Dickie Bannenberg, who worked alongside his father at the Bannenberg studio in Chelsea for almost twenty years, has spent five years collating and reviewing the studio archives to produce a definitive review of his father’s design life. The book includes drawings, sketches, photos and letters, giving an unparalleled insight into the man who epitomised style for four decades.
The book contains interviews with people who were integral to Jon Bannenberg’s life including his first yacht client, Geoffrey Simmonds; his first business partner, the fine art dealer John Partridge; and friends and yachting figures over the years. The book abounds with anecdotes and pithy quotes and each of the over-800 illustrations are captioned in the detail that only a Bannenberg can provide.
Jon Bannenberg: A Life in Design is a son’s tribute to the life and work of his remarkably talented father, whose ground-breaking work, great style and personal taste blazed a trail and established a benchmark in design through many disciplines for over four decades.
Dickie Bannenberg says: ‘My father liked how the pianist Artur Rubenstein once suggested music competitions should be scored with either 100 or zero. “You are either a musician or you aren’t.” He would say the same about design.’ This 544 page book, published by Julian Calder Publishing, celebrates Bannenberg’s design life of astonishing diversity, creativity and wit. His studio flourishes today under the direction of Dickie Bannenberg and Simon Rowell, as Bannenberg & Rowell, continuing to follow his trailblazing legacy, with a string of yachting industry awards and the recent signing of the largest ever yacht in Bannenberg studio history.
Below is a selection of the superb charter yachts with design by the late Jon Bannenberg.
