DON’T BLOCK TH E VIEW

An American interiors specialist looks back on a long and illustrious career that culminated in Lusine, Heesen’s full-custom 60-metre

TEXT BY MARILYN MOWER

There are various paths to becoming a yacht designer, but Dee Robinson’s route was perhaps unique. For the woman who oversaw the interior of Lusine, the full-custom 60-metre Heesen, it began with not one but two detours from medical school. “When I was five years old, I made up my mind to become a doctor,” she says. “That’s all I wanted to be.”

Then, while studying biology and physics at the University of Maryland, she took the abrupt step at age 19 of enlisting in the US Navy. It was the middle of the Vietnam War. “It wasn’t that I wanted to show support for the war. Those were my friends who were being drafted and shot at. I wanted to help them.”

With her pre-med background, she became a hospital corpsman and trained in emergency medicine and trauma care. She hoped to be assigned to a hospital ship, but in those days, women could not be billeted on US Navy ships. Frustrated with the glass ceiling, after her tour of duty, she returned to school and resumed her studies, now with the dream of being a reconstructive surgeon. Urban hospitals soon realized that the returning Navy corpsmen and Army medics had more advanced trauma skills than most of their classroom-trained specialists and recruited these veterans as emergency room physician assistants. Dee worked the night shift at George Washington University Hospital, attending class by day and preparing medical illustrations.

“I slept every other day,” she recalls. Then, while standing in line to select her senior year courses, she saw students lining up for courses in Interior design. “I didn’t know you could get a degree in that. I looked at the course list and saw things like ‘History of Furniture’. I realized I had seen a lot of what‘s ugly in this world. I wanted to work with people, but to make their lives beautiful instead, so I abruptly switched my major to Interior Design.”

One night Robinson, an avid Harley Davidson owner, wrangled a ticket to a celebrity roast for the daredevil Evel Knievel. At the event, she caught his eye. An assistant was sent to ask if she wanted to come to the after-party on his yacht.

“Yacht? The only boat I’d ever been on was the Staten Island Ferry. Sure, why not?” At the party, Knievel introduced himself and asked her what she did. “Rather than say I was still a student, I exaggerated and told him I was an interior designer. He said, ‘Great, you can redo my boat. I like blue’.” The ‘boat’ was a 124-foot Feadship he had renamed Evil Eye. He gave her a $10,000 check for materials on the spot. The next day, she hired her professors as her subcontractors.

“I needed them for their licenses and contacts,” she said. When she finished redoing his suite, he asked her to complete the rest of it. “I did a complete re-fit only to find out later that he was just chartering the boat. One day I got a call from a man who identified himself as an assistant to the yacht’s owner. I said, ‘Do you mean Evel’? ‘No’, the voice on the phone said, ‘the real owner, and he’s mad. He wants to see you right away.’

“When I arrived for the meeting, the owner looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘I hate what you did to my boat’. He paused for a moment. ‘But I’m hiring you to put it back exactly the way it was’. My second job was undoing my first.”

It was a rollicking start to a new career, but after graduation, the real yacht design work was in the trenches refitting 50- to 70-foot Hatterases, Browards and Burgers. “I remember my first new build over 100 feet, Lauderdale Lady. The builder put a price of $1 million on it, and I thought that he was crazy.” He wasn’t. After several years as the house designer for Hatteras of Lauderdale, she opened her own studio. Steadily, Dee

Robinson Custom Yacht Interiors grew into one of the most prolific such firms in the US. She designed a series of spec yachts called Victory Lane, first built in composite at Hatteras and then in aluminium at Trinity Yachts in New Orleans. In all, Robinson did nearly 20 Trinities up to 180 feet.

On Trinity’s pontoon at the 2003 Fort Lauderdale Boat Show, she met the second pivotal client of her career, the future owner of MY Lusine. “He was interested in building a 150-footer, but before he would sign, he asked to meet their designer. He invited me to sit and asked, ‘Can you tell me why I pay for the boat and then get the worst cabin? Why do I have to be forward where the boat gets smaller and the motion is greatest? I want to be in the best part of the boat. Can you do that for me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can redesign the entire bridge deck for you.’” He signed the contract with Robinson as his designer. The boat became White Star and was a game changer, with an owner’s stateroom, lounge office and private deck aft of the bridge.

Next, he hired her to design the interior of a 130 Westport as a Dubai-based mothership to his fishing tenders and a place to hang out with friends. She also renovated apartments for him in Paris and Beirut. Meanwhile, her yacht design career continued apace, often with three or four refits and a new build going on simultaneously. And then came the global financial crisis and new yacht contracts evaporated.

“I saw the writing on the wall. I thought I’ve had a good run, I’ve done everything I wanted to do except a new build in Northern Europe. But I knew it was time. I called all my clients to say that I was retiring and closing the business.”

Robinson clearly remembers the conversation with the owner and this sharp reply into the phone. “No. You will not,” he said. Robinson replied that she had made up her mind and had already released her staff. “Then you will become my personal design consultant. I am not going to start over,” he said, adding he was already negotiating for a replacement for the Trinity, a custom build at Delta Marine. “He was always open to new ideas and applications, but the basic requirements never changed: the view, privacy

Despite assisting with the build at Delta, she made a break with yachting by moving to western Kentucky with her husband, Phil, and immersing herself in establishing a charity, PAWS, that helps local sheltered pets. Upon discovering that Kentucky had no laws against animal abuse, she set out to fix that. Her once-solo crusade for animal welfare has become a state-wide legislative movement. And consistent with her first career detour, she is the Chaplain for the American Legion Honor Guard supporting efforts to help US veterans.

Then the owner called again. It was time to replace the Westport and he wanted Robinson on his team, evaluating not only designers but also yards for a custom yacht. He chose Heesen and the Dutch firm Sinot to create the interiors, with Robinson as his personal consultant to approve layouts, fabrics, finishes and furniture.

Thanks to Covid, it was not an easy build. “I knew from working with the Heesen group and his personal team it was going to be my very best effort yet, although by far the most difficult. Sadly, the gentleman died before his first trip aboard Lusine.”

The beautiful 60-metre perhaps checks the last item on Dee’s superyacht wish list. Robinson is an Italian-American New Yorker with a brilliant smile and a take-no-prisoners attitude, while Lusine’s owner was a quiet Middle Eastern businessman. “He told me, ‘you do not have fabrics as beautiful as God’s sea, so make the windows big and don’t block the view’.”

Theirs was an unlikely client-designer relationship, one that lasted 20 years through four yachts and several residential projects. Like many things in life, it began with a twist of fate.

WELCOME ABOARD LUSINE