Our in house designer, Kevin Burns, is featured this month in Maine Home and Design. “I want a design that’s going to be just as appealing 10 years from now as it is today, without ever becoming old-fashioned,” Burns says. “Design must advance technology, and technology must advance design. But it has to be a boat first.”
The article written by Maine Home and Design magazine writer Jaed Coffin is titled, The Life Aquatic”. He writes, “Inside the Back Cove offices and up a narrow spiral staircase is the helmlike office where Kevin Burns, vice president for design and product development, draws up the plans for Back Cove vessels as well as Sabre Yachts. The sister brands are bound by common ideas: elegant design, intuitive functionality, and an aesthetic founded on Burns’s notion of Maine classicism. “You should be able to tell the use of a thing by the way it looks,” Burns tells me.
“I really believe,” Burns says, half-laughing, “that design and technology must advance together.” Back in his office, we discuss innovation, including how a single joystick can maneuver the boat with the agility of a helicopter. With a red pen, he’s drawing arrows this way and that, sketching how the power generated from shorter shafts allows for maximum maneuverability. 
The streamlined efficiency in the production and design of a Back Cove yacht has a boyish zeal behind it. This is a young mariner’s dream world of wood shops, design computers, tools, gizmos, vague sketches and maps, and big visions. Perhaps it was the same dreamy spirit that lured Burns from the Midwest to the blue waters of the Atlantic. “Just when you think there’s no more to do, new technology presents a different way,” he says.
To read the article in it’s entirety along with other Back Cove news, visit the Back Cove “In the News” section of our website. To find a copy of this month’s Maine Home and Design magazine, click here.
