Okay, I promise this will be the last boat entry in my Journal for a while however I could not resist this one for a couple of reasons: the Aqua Riva by Marc Newson is just so cool and also because last week we lost Carl Riva at age 95; the designer of the original Riva.
Designed in 2010, these remakes were a very limited edition of only 20 units. Based very closely to the original with the styling, shape, colours and the interior spaces. The boat is 10m long, fits 6 people and no surface was left untouched, both the original and the remake are equally desirable. If you browse Marc’s website or if you’ve followed his design work; he takes a pretty special item, does a work over, adds the words ‘by Marc Newson’ and they become iconic and increase in value considerably. In 2017 a second hand model of this Aqua Riva by Marc Newson was available in Monaco for $635K, let assume the new ones were over $1M. More images below.
In the same vein, the Beretta ‘486 by Marc Newson’ side by side shotgun is a fabulous 2014 rework of a well engineered original dating back over 100 years. With my limited knowledge, the standard model of this firearm is approx $6,000 however the revised version designed by Marc is now $26K, these are machine made and machine engraved with no hand tooling so the value add is in the redesign and the name but not in the making. I’d be happy to be proved wrong but that’s my understanding.
Both the Aqua Riva & 486 by Marc Newson are beautiful. All images via Marc’s site, link to him here.
