About Us

Kwan Su Kim was just a small boy of six years when he first became interested in the various ships that have sailed the vast oceans of our beautiful planet.  For most of his life, busy building a business and raising a family, all he could do was read about the ships and dream.  In 2002, successful in business, his son grown up, Kwan Su found that he finally had the time and wherewithal to pursue his dream of building the ships that he had researched.

He started out purchasing expensive kits and tried building them in his spare time, only to find that it was a tremendously time consuming project and that he did not have the natural talent, nor the patience necessary.  He finally started commissioning persons to build the ships for him.  Upon completion of a few ships, Kwan Su started to realize that the quality of craftsmanship within the kits was not up to the standards he had hoped for.  Eventually, some pieces were replaced and special woods were ordered from different countries to authenticate the models and what started out as a hobby, became an obsession.

Today, at any one time he has between 12 – 15 craftsmen building different ships for his collection and most end up with more than 50% handmade pieces from scratch.  The craftsmen he has assembled range in expertise from heads of  Craft Colleges , to teachers and some simply masters of their craft.  He has built over 120 ships to date and the latter ones are completely scratch built.  Although the original ships built by his team were not much better than those exhibited in shows in this country, the experience of replacing objects with handmade pieces and the experience of building ships totally from scratch and doing this full time, 70 hours a week for the last five years has produced some very exquisite pieces of art for us to appreciate.

The pictures you can view within this website will give you a glimpse of the intricate detail and craftsmanship engrained into each ship.  Each ship has been researched and authenticated down to the minutest detail and pieced together for your viewing pleasure.  In order to replicate and authenticate some pieces, various raw materials had to be flown in from different parts of the world and no expense has been spared in the construction.  One ship was constructed with over 15,000 nails, just like the original – not an easy task given the size of the ship.

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