Rearranging the Deck Chairs

Can a cruise-ship skeptic be won over by fanatical design?

- By Justin Davidson

I found Virgin Voyages’ new cruise ship Scarlet Lady lolling just offshore from downtown Miami. She beckoned with her streaks of lipstick red, so I walked toward her, across the bridge and into the port, and doubled back, trudging through a sea of parking lots. As I approached the company’s blindingly white week-old terminal, the ship reared up behind it, deck upon glassed-in deck, like a condo that had drifted across Biscayne Bay. I had come to examine this vast floating object designed to transport thousands into a multiday fantasy of the yachtsman’s life. A cruise ship is a machine for leisure, and I wanted to know how it worked.

Scarlet Lady represents the first phase in Virgin’s expansion from air, land, and space into sea. A near-identical copy, Valiant Lady, will start sailing from Barcelona in May, and two more are in the works. With a capacity of 2,700 passengers and 1,160 crew, these $700 million babies are not the biggest, fanciest, or costliest of their ilk, but they may be the most fanatically designed. Hardly a square inch has been left to negligence or chance. Glimpses into areas where the crew lurks suggested that, as with all theatrical settings, the back of house is bare and basic. But the rest of the fit-out manifested the efforts of a dozen architecture and design teams, all managed by Virgin’s chief cat herder, Dee Cooper. Her job is to align these different creative spirits with the corporate brand—to patrol the border between bold and tacky, obvious and crazy.