Good in Wood

Irwin Jacobs knows what he likes after more than 30 years in the boat business. And what he likes more than anything is classic wooden powerboats—the kind that remind him of “old Hollywood,” he says, and the Kennedy clan circa 1960.

Genmar Holdings, Inc., of Minneapolis, Jacobs’s privately held company, manufactures 14 lines of recreational boats, brands including Larson, Four Winns, and Carver and everything from fiberglass fishing boats to 72-foot yachts. Lately, he’s added a new line that’s especially close to his heart.

Windsor Craft yachts are perfectly modern in terms of power and amenities: sophisticated Raymarine navigation electronics; air-conditioned cabins with flat-screen TVs; powerful dual Volvo engines. But the look and construction are old school. The boats are made entirely of African mahogany by custom woodworkers in Turkey and designed to Jacobs’s own old-Hollywood specifications.

Plans for all of Genmar’s boats are reviewed by him, Jacobs says, “and I might make little changes. But [Windsor Craft] has a lot more of me in it.”

The dream has been a long time coming. Jacobs bought his first boat in the 1950s, when he was 18 and working for his father’s Minneapolis liquidation business—a wooden Chris-Craft. He paid $1,700 for it and kept it on Lake Minnetonka. By the time he entered the boat-manufacturing business, in the late 1970s, the industry had moved on to fiberglass. But he never lost his love for vintage boats.

“I’ve always had a passion for them,” he says. “There is an elegance that can’t be achieved except in wood.”

His decision to pursue the retro ideal as a business came after a friend suggested that Jacobs check out the boat-building facilities of Vicem Yachts in Istanbul. Skilled craftsmen were available, and Turkish labor rates were cheap enough that the 3,800 man-hours required to make a mahogany hull alone would not render the enterprise insane.

Jacobs specified the Windsor Craft look and sent Genmar engineers to Istanbul in 2006. The first new Windsor Craft hit the water in 2007.

As of February, only 46 had been made, and Jacobs expects to stick to a production schedule of 23 to 25 boats a year for the foreseeable future. These are meant to be rare items, he says, appealing to a certain type of buyer “who wants something the world doesn’t get to see very often.”

“Everyone is proud of his boat, whatever the boat,” Jacobs says. “But this is a showstopper. There’s nothing else like it.”