This is probably the most obvious change when you compare the design of canal ships from the last century to this one. Most boat builders today design designs for modern owners who demand lounge or kitchen space in the stern. Instead, they're asking for sleeping areas in the front of the ship. This differs from old-style ships, where a room was often entered via the aft steps.
The house would be located in the bow. The general view would be that families would want to gather at the front and make the most of the bow deck. However, with the popularity of the stern of cruise ships, the main space for socializing is now often in the back of the ship. Now, a reverse distribution design has more sense.
This design has the bedroom on the front bow of the ship. The lounge is usually located in the back, although it is possible to find narrow ships with a lounge in the middle and a kitchen in the back. This is a traditional design because it recalls the days when narrow boats were working vessels and carried coal, wood, steel and practically everything a developing country needed. The interior designs of narrow boats usually follow two basic templates, but surprisingly, there will be a wide variety of differences between the two ships of this type that you choose to compare.
The key thing you'll probably want to know about this boat is that it's a 57-foot narrow ship with a reverse design. Narrow boat purists like to see room designs that more closely reflect the old working narrow ships of the industrial revolution. Most likely, this is because the controls in this photo are installed on a narrow vessel of traditional or semi-traditional design (where the stern is very different, it is usually much more compact, and often there is no separate control column). In a narrow vessel, cramming the kitchen results in a variety of solutions, including straight-line units on either side of a corridor (known casually as a “galley kitchen”); a U-shaped design with the corridor on one side, often narrowed slightly by a thin storage unit in the wall; or an L-shaped arrangement that is like the galley kitchen, but with one of the units ending in a section that crosses part of the width of the ship.
