It started with wanderlust and a romantic idea. In his long-haired hippie days, a young Steve Van Dam dreamed of sailing around the world — but before he could satisfy that urge, he decided he had to build the boat himself. “It just sounded romantic,” he says with a laugh. That impulse launched a career, a company, and a legacy that four decades later stands as one of the most remarkable stories in American craftsmanship.
En route to a honeymoon in Maine that they never quite reached, Steve and Jean Van Dam stopped in Port McNicoll, Ontario, on Georgian Bay. What was meant to be a brief detour became a 3.5-year apprenticeship with a master boatbuilder — and a parallel education in homebuilding and cabinetmaking that would shape everything Steve went on to create. The couple eventually returned to Jean’s hometown of Harbor Springs, Michigan, set up their first modest shop, and began building wooden boats from a garage workshop behind their mobile home. Van Dam Custom Boats was born in 1977, and it has never stopped growing since.
The company that award-winning journalist Susan R. Pollack profiled in her feature Pursuit of Perfection is one that has outgrown every space it has ever occupied — expanding locations multiple times, adding a second business in Boyne Boat Yard with 50,000 square feet of heated service and storage space, and running a yacht brokerage alongside the main boatbuilding operation. Through all of it, the mission has remained unchanged: to design and build the world’s finest wooden boats.
At the heart of that mission is the cold-molding process that Steve mastered as an apprentice and has refined across decades of increasingly ambitious builds. “We call it laminated wood construction — we build up layers of thinner wood into thick layers, kind of like making plywood,” he explains. Thin layers of wood are laminated with room-temperature adhesives and gently bent around a frame to form the hull and other shapes, creating boats that are light, strong, and built with superior durability. Every plank of wood is hand-selected for both beauty and integrity — typically Honduran or African mahogany — with painstaking attention paid to book-matching grain patterns so that every surface tells a coherent visual story.
A considerable portion of the 5,000 to 25,000 hours invested in each build is devoted entirely to hand sanding — the foundation of the lustrous finish for which Van Dam boats are known worldwide. “While it takes longer, it leads to better results and is worth the investment of time,” Ben says. That same patience extends to the design process. The shop spent six months on design alone for Iris, the 31-foot coastal cruiser built for actor Ed Hermann — best known for portraying Franklin D. Roosevelt on PBS and Richard Gilmore on Gilmore Girls — before spending another nine months bringing it to life. Hermann docked Iris in Mackinaw City for seven years, using her as a floating library and retreat. “He’d go sit and read — get away from the world,” Steve recalled. Hermann’s testimonial to the company spoke for itself: “If you are looking to build a boat of any size, style, speed or pleasurable use, to the most exacting standards of workmanship, finish and seaworthiness, there is simply no better place to do it than Van Dam Custom Boats.”
The boats that have followed Iris span an extraordinary range. Patrician, a 55-foot day-sailing yacht launched in 1988, required Van Dam to engineer and construct a complete electrical and hydraulic system allowing a single person to handle all systems from the helm — a technical breakthrough that expanded what the company believed was possible. Alpha Z, a sleek 100-mph wooden powerboat launched a decade later, shattered perceptions of what a wooden boat could be. “Until then, everyone had pigeon-holed us as a builder of sailboats and runabouts,” Ben says. “That broke the mold for the wooden boat world. People didn’t realize you could do a contemporary, very shapely boat different than any classic runabout. The fact that it was so fast and so sleek and so different from what a traditional wooden boat ever was thought to be makes it extremely special.” Alpha Z also inspired Van Dam to build out a complete in-house metal fabrication shop — now capable of custom-producing everything from metal latches and powered seats to exhaust systems, pivots, joints, and hardware of every kind.
More recently, Catnip — a 30-foot Art Deco-inspired retro runabout with a one-of-a-kind convertible top — and Chiara, a 43-foot wooden dayboat with lines drawn from military stealth boats and aircraft, have pushed the boundaries further still. Each one is a complete original. Every Van Dam boat is guaranteed one-of-a-kind. “They’re all different and, on some level, are all an extension of the owner’s personality,” Ben says. “It’s super-interesting to try and inject the customer’s personality into a boat.” Client requests have run the full spectrum — from custom steering wheels and freestanding bent-glass windshields to gold-leaf accents and hand-painted waterlines. The 27-foot high-performance racer Jacqueline, for instance, carries charcoal gray upholstery, violet bottom paint, a gold boot stripe, and a canary yellow engine detailed with violet and polished stainless chrome. Gold-leaf accents appear throughout. There is no maximum. “Customers can make it as tricked-out and exotic as they want,” Steve says.
Van Dam backs every boat with a lifetime warranty against leaking or rot — and with zero warranty claims across four decades of operation, it is a guarantee built on an unbroken record. “These boats are built to be passed down generation to generation,” Ben says. “Our early boats are still in operation. If you keep the proper maintenance on them, they’ll last forever.”
In a boating world dominated by fiberglass and instant gratification, Van Dam Custom Boats stands as something rarer and more enduring — an antidote, Ben calls it, to disposable culture. “We’re really trying to promote and maintain this Old World craftsmanship,” he says. “It’s a pursuit of perfection, and we want to do it better than anyone else.” Every time a Van Dam boat pulls into port, Steve notes, the same thing happens. “There’s always a bunch of people gathered around admiring them.” After forty-plus years, that has never changed.