About Grainger Designs

I surfed and sailed centreboard dinghies as a kid and I came to yacht design through a passion for the ocean and love of art and design. The early attempts by westerners to design and build multihulls were crude and ungainly compared to the elegant and highly evolved craft of the Asians, Melanesians and Polynesians, and yet I always had a sense that multihulls had a certain "rightness" about them.

I was fortunate to come to multihull design in the mid 1980's just as the modern multihull was reaching a new level of sophistication in structures, performance and aesthetics. This evolution was to lead in the coming decades to complete acceptance of catamarans and trimarans as a highly evolved racing machines and catamarans as practical cruise boats for charter or personal use.

In 1985 I designed a 26'/8m LOA trimaran Born to Run and the design was known as the 075. Born to Run was an outstanding success on the race course, taking line honours in all of the significant trailer yacht races in Australia in her first year on the water, 1986, and creating demand for new designs that enabled me to establish myself as a full time designer.

In the following years I created a series of very successful trailer yachts and racing boats including Hard Yakka, ATL/Oaks, Turning Point, Mad Max, APC Max, Trilogy, and the Raider production catamarans.

Between them these boats, and others not mentioned here have dominated the Australian inshore racing circuit, in some years taking a clean sweep of all the major racing events both in handicap and line honours. Meanwhile the larger boats like Flat Chat and Taeping have taken line honours victories in Australia's premier offshore event for multihulls, the Brisbane to Gladstone Race.

It wasn't just racing boats though. There was room for innovation and design development in cruising cats. Grainger Designs created the Alfresco series of open bridge cruising cats, and then the G37, G430 and a number of variations on these that stretched to 65' LOA.

There was also the Chincogan 40 and 52' production cats and a range of motor and sailing cats for Lightwave Yachts. I also designed a number of custom boats including Cut Loose and EfJay.

Today the focus is on the use of new and rapidly evolving build processes to bring new creativity to the designs and simultaneously reduce build costs.

In 2010 with the boating industry in Australia and much of the rest of the world in neutral gear I moved to Thailand in search of fresh inspiration and to work with Arnie Duckworth on the Happy Feet research project. This project covers a number of fields including rig design, different foiling configurations for cruising boats and the development of a folding system for trailerable catamarans.

As it happens, with the boating industry in South East Asia rapidly becoming more efficient and technologically sophisticated, the move has opened up fresh opportunities to work with new builders and new building techniques. In this part of the world there is no shortage of inspiration to draw from with numerous variations of the traditional catamaran, trimaran and proa still commonly in use throughout South east Asia.

Tony Grainger Phuket January 2010.