Sea of luxury

When he was newly married in the late 1940s, John Crean would drive on hot summer days with his wife, Donna, from Anaheim to Newport Harbor. Like other tourists facing the cool ocean breeze, he pressed his nose against the invisible wall separating him from the yachts, cruisers and sloops skimming over green water or bobbing in their slips. Who are these people, he wondered. How can they afford this?

Now, the well-known Orange County philanthropist, who made his fortune in mobile homes, owns a yacht so big its maintenance costs are estimated at $1,000 a day. The 125-foot Donna C III has five staterooms, a walk-in freezer and refrigerator, a home theater and a Steinway player piano, bolted to the floor. It makes its own water, 100 gallons an hour, for drinking, showers and the Jacuzzi on the bridge.

The only problem is that Crean couldn’t find a berth big enough in the harbor’s yacht clubs. So he purchased a $7-million home on the north end of Lido Island for the slip alone. “It’s a boathouse,” he says with a chuckle.

One of the West’s prettiest large harbors, Newport Harbor is a magnet for successful entrepreneurs, good-time day cruisers and sailors, longtime sailing families and blue-blazer traditionalists who like to say they made their money the old-fashioned way: They inherited it. Originally envisioned as a commercial port, the bay is big enough for weekly sunset sailboat races or for cruisers to motor over to Joe’s Crab Shack or the Balboa Bay Club for dinner. But the slips are small, too short for the mega yachts that cruise Florida and the Mediterranean -- a fortunate situation since it has created a small-town ambience, a village of luxury, oceangoing mansions and seaworthy penthouse apartments.

No matter the state of the economy, builders and designers say the passion for new, bigger, more sophisticated and more personal yachts continues unslaked here. Interior decorators keep busy helping owners get what they want: homes away from home, offices to keep in touch with work, heliports, fireplaces and gyms.

When Raouf Halim, 43, sits at the helm of his $1.7-million, 64-foot Sunseeker, he breathes in an intoxicating aroma of saltwater and new leather. It’s the same Italian leather, he says, used in Bentleys.

“What I love about the boat is that it’s very consistent with my style: aggressive, fast-paced, technology-oriented,” says Halim, chief executive officer of Mindspeed, a company that produces semiconductors for Internet equipment. The 16 pages of custom specifications he ordered for his yacht, handcrafted over 15 months in England, included high-end navigation systems, hideaway plasma TV screens and meticulous cherrywood and birch detailing.

The interior is carpeted in white and decorated with Italian silks.

Each room, including a master suite for himself and his wife and a three-bunk suite for his son and friends, is climate-controlled and equipped with its own satellite receiver and high-speed Internet connection. What’s more, each is illuminated with rope lights on dimmers. “It’s very romantic at night,” says Halim.

Joel Romero, a broker who sells the Sunseeker, a relatively new model to the West, says most of his customers are “very organized people. All their time is scheduled. They have multiple businesses.”

Too busy for long cruises, they often fly to meet their boats in Mexico, Alaska or the Caribbean. What about fishing? “If they want fish, they’ll fly it in,” Romero says.

Only a few are still interested in nautical stripes and emblems. “A lot of them say, ‘I don’t have to do that in my boat. It is a boat,’ ” says designer Teri Carano of Costa Mesa, who decorates about 120 boats a year in the 55- to 64-foot range. Her clients prefer what she calls “Southern California traditional,” a clean-cut Ralph Lauren look with stripes and plaids, or Tommy Bahama’s pineapples and palm trees in reds and golds.

“So many just want to sit down and feel comfortable and be happy in their boat,” she says.

Unlike homes, boats are curvy, self-sufficient and mobile. “Every single thing is different because it’s a boat,” says Carano, who crewed on a boat for six years. Dishes need holding bars, counters need lips, and lose items -- such as toasters or vases -- need to be secured with Velcro or earthquake putty.

Mattresses need to be custom cut to fit beds that aren’t rectangular. Because there’s rarely enough room to make a bed or store sheets, Carano makes her clients thin sleeping bags with snap-out sheets for washing. When not in use, the bags roll up into bolsters tied with decorative cords.

Her son custom-makes special porthole shades (angled and secured) that are white on the outside so they don’t spoil the lines of the boat.

Despite innovations in fabrics and finishes, interiors last only three to five seasons, Carano says. She suggests owners use longer-lasting synthetics instead of 100% cottons, silks or real leather.

Not only do boat owners redecorate regularly, they also keep buying up, she says. First-time boat owners, she says, “don’t know this happens to them. But if they buy a small one, they go to a bigger one, then a bigger one, and on up the line.”

Crean’s yacht is his third. He needed a bigger vessel, he says “to get all the stuff I wanted on a yacht.”

A fisherman, a cook and a self-described “neat freak,” Crean, 78, built a cockpit to fish from and a combination seat-freezer that can hold 2 tons of fish on trips to Mexico, Catalina or the Channel Islands.

Crean usually has one crew member and often cleans up after himself. “The people who go with us are boat people and they pitch in,” he says. They include friends and roughly half his family of four children, 14 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

To furnish their yacht, the Creans had special dining and card tables made and bought the rest of the furniture from stores and catalogs.

On the other end of the scale, the sloop belonging to Don and Judy Cole, a 19-year-old, 38-foot Nantucket, is so compact below deck that a faucet in the sink doubles as a pull-out shower head, and the floor becomes a shower stall with drainage. In the galley, the icebox lid serves as a counter top. Typically, Judy says, their guests are people who are used to close quarters or “very good friends.”

The Coles, recently married, met at the Bahia Corinthian Yacht Club just across the water from Balboa Island where they both had boats and had been attached to other people. On their first date, he asked her out to one of his favorite places -- the galley of the sloop -- and they talked under mood candles and over wine, and barbecued portabello mushrooms with goat cheese sauce until 1 a.m.

“We had to get back,” Judy says, “or people would talk.”

The couple, who manage property in Laguna Beach, married aboard the boat. The ceremony in the harbor’s turning basin drew a spontaneous crowd of friends in sailboats, power boats, electric boats and kayaks. “It was fun for everyone to see how things worked out,” Judy says.

Basically, she says, they can do everything in the teak-trimmed interior they can do at home -- just in smaller quarters that require a little smarter manner. Meals have to be planned ahead. There’s no room for a food processor or a cappuccino machine. “We just use French press coffee and milk,” she says.

While owners of bigger boats must hire crews to maintain their yachts, the Coles do all the work themselves, varnishing the teak trim and scrubbing the bottom of the hull once monthly. “We can’t write checks for everything we do,” she says.

Boat builders estimate annual maintenance costs at 10% of the purchase price. On a $4-million boat, that adds up to more than $1,000 a day -- not counting yacht club dues and slip fees.

In some cases, the expense is the attraction. Carano says one customer told her she wanted to spend $180 a yard for fabric so “nobody who sees it can be able to afford to copy it.” Another man told a colleague he wanted fabric that would make people say, “Wow, he has money.”

The Coles’ dock neighbor, Newport Beach obstetrician John Wheeler, figures it’s just the cost of stopping to smell the sea air.

Wheeler, 44, grandson of a classic wooden boat builder on the East Coast, says he was burned out and facing a midlife crisis four years ago when he decided to search for his roots and find a hobby. He moved his family from Irvine to Balboa Island and located a 1958 day cruiser -- one of the 4,000 boats made by his grandfather -- in New Jersey. Wheeler named the boat Legacy and had it trucked to Newport Beach. With two teenagers and a 5-year-old at home, he said, “I realized I’ve got four or five years left with them. It’s a way to spend time together with the family on something all ages can enjoy.”

They spend at least one night a week aboard, after walking over to the boat club from their home.

Sometimes they’ll take the boat overnight to Catalina. He says he finds puttering relaxing and hopes someday they’ll have fond memories of polishing and varnishing, restoring the mahogany boat with its teak deck to retro glory.

The Wheelers kept the old stainless steel cooktop and the original icebox, repainted the tile in the head and added a microwave and new flooring. Working one day a week on the boat, he’s spent $100,000 so far and says he could easily put in another $100,000.

The money isn’t the point Wheeler says. He’s proud of their work, and as a result of his new hobby, he says his blood pressure has dropped 20 points. “As long as I don’t destroy my hands working on a boat, I’ll be OK,” he says.

Several boat owners say what they like best is taking their second home out to sea. “It’s a tremendous thrill,” Halim says.

Crean, however, isn’t given to sentiment or romance. The best thing about his boat, he says, is “the fact that it’s paid for.”