Page 56 - SHARP Winter 2022

Free Ride
How one industrial designer refurbished his dream bike
BY TORY HEALY
“ITAKE MY TIME BUT WILL GO FAST,” SAYS Mischa Couvrette, the creative director of Hol- lis+Morris, a furniture and lighting design firm in To- ronto. We’re sitting at a café on Dundas Street West; the traffic is loud, but he’s calm in the fray. We are, after all, talking about his newly refurbished motorcycle. With its tank pitched forward, its stance — like Couvrette’s — is dauntless. Like the bike, he navigates a jam beautifully. The bike began as a poorly reworked 1986 BMW touring motorcycle that Couvrette had bought pre-pan- demic. Despite limited access to resources, he needed to get the bike up to speed during COVID. “Freedom,” he says, “has been my top priority since I can remember; being able to travel and do whatever was always the goal.” In response to the pandemic’s challenges, he flipped his usual fast, process-driven approach to design, slowing down to focus on form first. He collaged favourite bike components together using Photoshop, then passed this sketch along to Brian Kates of Motobrix, a custom
motorcycle builder in Scarborough.
Kates disassembled the donor bike and went through
Couvrette’s checklist: tilt the tank forward by seven de- grees; reconfigure the back end so that the seat followed the angle of the tank; set the stainless-steel exhaust pipes asymmetrically. After the non-essentials were stripped, it was made even leaner by hiding the computer boards and wiring. Following a year of body work and a mid- night-blue paint job, it’s now a nimble tracker ready to rip and cruise. “It took about 20 hours of riding it to really understand what the bike had become,” Couvrette says. “It took hitting a bump and taking turns to perfect the final iteration. After we loosened the suspension for a softer ride, it’s now perfectly set up for me.”
Surge ahead and hang back — this is how Cou- vrette entered design in the first place. While finishing his degree in marine biology and environmental science at Dalhousie University, Couvrette became disillusioned with how slowly change happened in these fields. Instead
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