Behind every Riva is a single design studio, and the same two men who founded it. For more than thirty years, the lines of every Riva, from a 27-foot runabout to a 50-metre superyacht, have come from one place: Officina Italiana Design. It is one of the great continuities in modern yachting.
Officina Italiana Design was founded in 1994 by Mauro Micheli and Sergio Beretta. Micheli is the designer, the pencil behind the lines. His path in was almost accidental. After art school, he entered a competition run by the Riva shipyard, and the talent he showed became a career. Beretta is the manager and entrepreneurial mind of the partnership. The two share a deep love of contemporary art that runs through everything they make.
From the start, the studio’s identity has been bound to Riva. It designs the entire range, exterior lines and interiors alike. It is one of the longest and most exclusive designer-builder relationships in the industry.
For Micheli, designing a Riva is closer to shaping an emotion than drawing a boat. The studio’s signature is restraint. Clean lines, balanced volumes, the discipline to leave out anything unnecessary. The goal never changes: to create something that still looks right in thirty years. That idea of stylistic longevity is how a brand born in 1842 stays entirely contemporary.
The results speak. The Rivamare, the Aquariva, the larger Diva and Bellissima superyachts. Each carries the same DNA, scaled up or down but never lost. The work has been recognised again and again at the industry’s major design awards.
For owners here, this continuity is part of what makes a Riva a Riva. You are not buying a styling exercise that dates with the season. You are buying the work of a studio that has spent three decades refining one coherent vision, connecting a modern hull in a Hong Kong marina to the mahogany classics of the Italian lakes. It is design as heritage, and heritage as value.
Explore the Riva range at Starship Yachts, the brand’s exclusive Hong Kong dealer, or arrange a viewing.
