Our whole lives are made of stories.
Story is everything.
Story is the only thing really that at the end of the day we're trying to convey.
Everything we do is filled with enchantment.
As our guests are walking through the space at different times of the day,
you have to bring it alive to make that emotional connection.
Why is this handle wood?
Why is this brass, instead of bronze?
All of that has an answer because it has to be part of the story that we're telling.
Through all of our design work,
we are creating a castle on the sea and this is our Disney Wish.
[Upbeat Music]
I was finishing my graduate degree in architecture
and I was on a trip to Walt Disney World.
I was walking through Epcot and thinking, this is incredible.
This level of detail is so beautiful.
And something in my brain went, that's a job!
That could be your job!
Growing up, my dad was a career military officer on big ships,
so I spent a lot of time as a little kid wandering around ships that he was captain of.
He brought back a lot of stories and a lot of things from around the world.
That's what Walt Disney did.
He brought those wonders of the world back here and he created his theme parks.
And then we've gone on now to create these cruise ships,
which create a portal to the rest of the world for our guests.
The Disney Wish before she had a name, her nickname was Enchantment.
It sprang from the idea of a castle.
A castle is centerpiece in every single one of our parks.
So it was really kind of obvious to us that we should
give Disney cruise line our own castle on the seas.
Everyone has their sort of own core belief of what does magic mean?
What is my wish?
And that's what we've tried to sort of capture within the design of the ship.
When we looked at the design of enchantment,
we looked at the incorporation of Cinderella, our most iconic princess.
At the centerpiece of her story is a dream is a wish the heart makes.
You have to put wish on there.
When we were designing the Disney Wish,
we go back to sort of what is the core motif?
The Grand Hall is the ultimate body of this idea
of enchantment and our classic Disney fairy tale.
It's the heart of the ship.
It sets the theme for everything that the guest
will enjoy over the course of their journey.
Here we're really celebrating the story of Cinderella.
You will see Cinderella as our beautiful atrium and Grand Hall bronze.
And we will also see stained glass in the shape of pumpkin coaches.
It is light and airy.
It has soaring columns that rise up three stories in the air.
The ceiling is covered with decorative ribs.
There's a chandelier that sits in the middle of the space
that's encrusted with thousands of beautiful sparkling crystals.
And at the bottom of that chandelier is a star that signifies the wish.
The shape of the chandelier was actually inspired by the film Cinderella.
Fairy Godmother draws this beautiful wand spiral of magic
around Cinderella, and her dress becomes real.
We took that shape and we made that into the chandelier.
Cinderella is really a classic fairy tale and it is about dreaming and wishing.
And this is just a continuation of that.
There's nothing we do in the design that isn't part of that feeling
or that place or that emotion that you've seen the character act out on screen.
That is exactly what we wanted to capture in the Grand Hall.
The Disney Wish for me is a passion project where I can bring my whole self
with my dad being in the military nearly his entire life and being on large ships.
I do have a real emotional connection to this project.
And so now to be working on a technically advanced wonder of the world like a cruise ship.
I would hope that my father,
who passed away a decade ago,
I know he would be so proud.
If someone had told me as a child that I would be part of this incredible team,
creating cruise ships for the whole world,
one hundred percent would not have believed them.
And for me, it's this literal representation of my childhood passions.
We can only hope that our guests feel a lot of the magic
in the heart that we've poured into this project.