ART & DESIGN
ART & DESIGN TRENDSETTERS to say that the two-wheelers are more than about just riding fast and long, as any stock motorcycle might offer; they are part of a culture that touches on design, music, history, community and, perhaps above all, cool. It is why the café racer has been the supreme bike style since this underground scene went overground – even if riding conditions tend to dictate more local preference, with the US into choppers and cruisers, while much of Europe is into scramblers – and why the dominant custom-bike aesthetic is now typically more retro than futuristic. It is also why, Venier hopes, with the scene’s underlying sense of oneupmanship and competition, that better still examples of this urban art form are yet to come: “The best builders will show us bikes that we’ve never seen before.” While manufacturers of off-the-shelf motorcycles are increasingly offering the plethora of options of a kind now established in the car industry – all the better to allow one’s post-globalisation choice to stand out – custom builders take this to the nth degree: cutting and lengthening, reshaping and repositioning, handmaking and finishing parts, sourcing rare vintage examples of others, and combining all that with an aesthetic and engineering excellence that is often more instinct than training. Certainly, the level of craft and inventiveness in a custom-bike build often makes the results so spectacular that clients are more inclined just to look at them than ride them, and all the more so once they have O L D E M P I R E M O T O R C Y C L E S When a British company like Alec MacKaye’s Old Empire takes a widely used stock motorcycle like the 1979 Yamaha SR500, you know the results will have to be very different from the norm to justify its choice. Hence the likes of the understated, classic stylings of the Snipe (below) and 2015’s Lightning Mk1, styled after the RAF fighter jet of the same name and just as sleek and minimal. With its seat seemingly suspended in mid-air, the visual balance of the motorcycle is all about forward motion. oldempiremotorcycles.com N O I S E C Y C L E S Scott “T-Bone” Jones’s ascent in the custom-bike-building world has been as rapid as one of his machines. Entirely self-taught as a bike builder, he launched his company, Noise, in Santa Ana, California, in 2012. He was invited to show at Born Free, the US’s premier custom-bike show, in 2013. There he won top prize with his Sneak Attack, a reworked 1952 63 Panhead, as well as the prestigious Harley- Davidson Motor Award. That has made him very busy indeed – with 20 motorcycles typically on the order books. noisecycles.com MR MARTINI It may be an unlikely name for a product whose enjoyment should probably preclude alcohol, but Mr Martini has stuck. Visitors from Triumph and Harley-Davidson were so impressed by what dealer Nicola Martini was doing with his own machines in his spare time that he decided to create his own brand. Martini occasionally opines that his compatriots, the car-obsessed Italians, don’t really get custom motorcycles, but that hasn’t stopped Mr Martini builds – think period style with modern standards – being bought all over the world. mrmartini.it H O O K I E C O The unusual duo behind the Dresden-based brand, graphic designer Nico Mueller and designer Sylvia Petrasch, only started working together on a professional footing in 2014. But their combined talents have quickly seen Hookie Co win a reputation for its distinctively clean, modernist style, a German original that sits very comfortably in the country‘s tradition. hookie.co PHOTOS CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: SIMON BUCK, © MR MARTINI, DAVID OHL, © NOISE CYCLES 76 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
STEFANO VENIER Moving from furniture design to custom-motorcycle building may seem like a left-field shift, but Venier sees both products alike as exercises in form and function – although, he notes, bikes are more fun. The Italy-born, New York-based designer started modifying scooters at the age of 16, but training in product design diverted him until he built his first bike, the acclaimed Diabola V35C. Now, as then, his approach is original: he’s working on an all-aluminium, super-light bike with 3-D-printed parts. venier-motorcycles.com PHOTOS CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: DONATELLO TREVISIOL, © DEUS EX MACHINA, © RONIN, © FUEL seen their dream realised. “Everyone into motorcycles has this idea of what one should look like to them,” says Scott Jones of Noise Cycles. “They want their bike – a reflection of their personality.” That’s what the cream of the builders give them, even if they’re typically unsure of the idea of these two-wheeled sculptures standing still. “We want each bike to look good, of course,” says Sylvia Petrasch of Hookie Co. “But, for us, it’s still about that incredible feeling you get the first time you go out into the countryside on a motorcycle. It’s not all about the building of beautiful objects – it’s the moving on them that matters.” Herewith, a handful of exemplars that are sure to stir the soul. F U E L Based in Barcelona, Fuel’s founder Karles Vives began customising as a teenager, testing his builds in the deserts of Morocco and establishing the annual Scram Africa event in the process. These days he makes just five or six motorcycles each year, typically reflecting the company’s aesthetic: a lack of colour, a foregrounding of build quality and a preference for old BMWs as the donor framework. Even now he is most proud of his first build: a scrambler based on a BMW R100 RT. Why? Because when he made it he started out not knowing how to change a sparkplug. fuelmotorcycles.eu DEUS EX MACHINA Some custom builds become almost folkloric, especially when they combine the talents of Deus Ex Machina and Woolie’s Workshop’s Michael Woolaway. Of course, that the motorcycle, the 4cyl, had BMW Motorrad designer Ola Stenegård involved and was made for Orlando Bloom helped as well. The result is a beefed-up rat bike. Bloom was so pleased he made a short film about it. deuscustoms.com RONIN MOTOR WORKS Ronin was born of a regard for a particular motorcycle – the Buell 1125 (a sub-brand of Harley-Davidson) – and, on that brand’s demise, the need to do something with the 47 1125Rs and 1125CRs its founders were able to acquire from the liquidators. Each of the resulting overhauls is released at a tantalisingly slow rate, reflective of the 18 months of design and 200 hours of build-time that goes into it, but it is most memorable for its striking high, perpendicular radiator. the47.com CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 77
