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For over two decades, Maxime d’Angeac has quietly accumulated one French architecture’s most covetable portfolios, not least the flagship boutiques for Hermès and Guerlain, bespoke interiors for Daum, and the full redesign of the Orient Express train carriages, the first such overhaul in nearly a century. What he had never done was anything remotely nautical, a fact that did not deter the Accor Group’s chairman and CEO Sébastien Bazin, who tapped him in 2022 to design the world’s largest sailing yacht for the Orient Express marque.
There were loud doubters.
The Orient Express Corinthian sets sail
« Everyone told me it would not be possible », d’Angeac now says, with the measured satisfaction of someone who has just proven a great many people wrong. Forty-four months after the idea of the yacht was first green-lit at the Monaco Yacht Show in September 2022, the Orient Express Corinthian (which we previewed in 2024) is afloat, and the sceptics are conspicuously quieter.
That 44-mont sprint – from a blank page to a completed vessel this April – produced what is, for now anyway, the world’s largest sailing yacht. At 220m and carrying just 110 guests across 54 suites, the Orient Express Corinthian is, in the most literal sense, an exercise in deliberate restraint at impossible scale.