Lagoon Catamarans For Sale

Lagoon was created in 1984 inside Jeanneau, at a moment when French yards were pouring what they had learned from ocean-racing multihulls into boats meant for cruising. The design office was VPLP — Marc Van Peteghem and Vincent Lauriot Prévost, then a young partnership that would go on to draw the fastest offshore trimarans in the world — and that association has held for four decades since. When Groupe Beneteau acquired Jeanneau in 1995 Lagoon went with it, and the boats have been built at Bordeaux ever since.

What made Lagoon the most numerous name in cruising catamarans was never speed. It was the decision to treat interior volume as the point rather than the penalty: full-height bridgedeck saloons, hulls carried well forward, and an accommodation plan a family could actually live in at anchor. The 380, launched at the end of the 1990s, took that idea to its most successful conclusion and became the best-selling cruising catamaran ever built. On the larger boats the flybridge helm — which Lagoon did more than any other yard to make ordinary — put the wheel and the guests on the same level above the cockpit.

The modern range is a visible change of direction. Patrick le Quément, once head of design at Renault, brought the vertical hull windows and squared cabin profile that identify a Lagoon at a distance, while VPLP moved the rig aft, shrinking the headsail to a self-tacking jib and putting the work into a large square-topped mainsail. It is a rig built around two people handling the boat rather than a crew.

Lagoon also supplied the world’s charter fleets in volume for three decades, which is why it is the catamaran most sailors have stood aboard first, and why the same model is met both as a charter boat and as an owner’s version.