Q4 For Luxury Voyages

Press, Issue 30997, 1 March 1966, Page 17

Q4 For Luxury Voyages

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) LONDON, Feb. 28. Virtually the entire interior design of the Q 4, the Cunard line’s £25 million liner now on the stocks on Clydeside, had been scrapped, the “Sunday Times” reported. The new plans transformed the ship, effectively, into a one-class vessel designed wholly for sea-voyaging as luxurious leisure. Preliminary findings of a market survey conducted by the “Economist” intelligence unit, commissioned by Cunard’s new chairman, Sir Basil

Smallpiece, showed that the three classes envisaged at first were unnecessary.

Passengers would apparently accept two, in time even one. So Q 4 had been redesigned as a two-class ship, and would sail as such, but with a clear view to its eventual conversion to a single class. Gone were three classes of shops, three libraries and a stratified multiplicity of lounges, bars and restaurants. In their place came two night clubs, two casinos, a huge ballroom two decks high with the upper deck open to the sea air on summer nights, a shopping arcade, a cocktail lounge

which by day was a coffee bar, teen-age and children’s rooms, and a big, classless restaurant discreetly compartmented to disguise its size.

Almost ail the ship would be open to passengers of both classes, but in extremes the rich might retreat to the few particularly plush hideouts such as a night elub, casino and lounge, said the “Sunday Times.” What this all meant for the designers was a frantic month. The Royal College of Art students had been asked to submit ideas by the end of March, and designers of more ambitious rooms had little more tiine.