Several months ago I decided it was time for a new gravel bike, so I reached out to some good friends of mine at Haute Bicycle Co. in Richmond, VA and asked them to build me a frame. Richmond is a lovely little hotbed of cycling culture and I was eager to ride a bike that was born in the same city that I was. Wilson and Stephen at Haute Bikes are taking some creative approaches in an effort to produce high-quality, handmade bikes at an attainable price point – something that is pretty unusual to find. Their bikes have boutique, ‘bike show-level' details and offer some beautiful and functional aspects like hand-bent seatstays, custom 3D printed chainstay yokes and some very clean and clever cable routing ports. We worked out some custom geometry tweaks to their standard gravel bike, the ‘Sauce’, mostly to make it play well with the Cane Creek Invert fork that I planned to use. We adjusted the geometry for the longer fork length and adapted their stock geometry to fit my own personal dimensions and handling preferences.

The hardest part of putting together a custom bike is choosing the paint. I wanted this build to have real character and to tell a story standing on its own. I like the overall idea of something very modern and high tech that looks like something from a bygone era. New mixed with old. This is part of the reason why Star Wars is so appealing. It’s science fiction, but set in the past where space ships are rusty and warriors fight with swords, not bioweapons or AI. It sparks our imagination but still feels grounded in such a way that we can relate to it with some sense of nostalgia.

The thought of an orange gravel bike always appealed to me for some reason and in the search for inspiration, I thought of the 1993 Bridgestone XO-1 in ‘Construction Pumpkin.’ I always loved the deep orange colorway and I thought that paying homage to this early gravel bike would be perfect. I happen to have a good friend who owns an XO-1 and it occurred to me that he could help me paint match the original colorway. I knew right away that if we pulled it off, we would need to photograph both bikes together – a bit of a ‘then & now’ of gravel bikes.

With over 30 years of technological development separating them, the technology in these bikes may be pretty different but the way they make us feel has stayed pretty much the same. That’s the magic of bikes I suppose.