Off The Bike: Cannon Beach - The Haystack House

Community is the best part of cycling, without it, experience and suffering mean nothing. This season, the Speedvagen SSCX team and Mettle teams have become pretty good friends. Early on, we discovered that our goals, to try and create a positive community, and create stoke for every category, aligned. Because of those goals, we always tried to place our team tents near each other.

Through this, I got to know Randall Fransen, who owns Mettle. This lead to a little design project that I’m pretty stoked on. Randall and his wife Larissa own The Haystack Haus, an Airbnb beach house out at Cannon Beach. (Which just happens to be one of my family’s favorite places to visit on the weekends.) They were looking for some branding for their new venture and reached out to me to see if I would be into doing it. The timing couldn’t have been better. Feeling a little burnt out on cycling design, I knew this would be the perfect project for a recharge of the batteries. 

The stars aligned (a cx-free weekend and no other plans) and we were able to take the family on a micro vacation to The Haystack Haus for some rest and research. The Haystack Haus is a cabin full of light and warmth. It’s minimal, yet has everything you need, from coffee to Candyland, all adding up to a stay that keeps the kids and adults happy. Plenty of room for dancing and play kept us comfortable and entertained and also means we will be back with more family. We cooked dinner, then took the 3 minute walk to the beach to enjoy the fantastic weather and sunset.

After that I sat down and tried to draw from the experience and create a logo based on that warmth. The end result was something very minimal for my style and something I’m pretty stoked on because of how different it is. This might not seem like it has much to do with cycling, but it’s those shared experiences, suffering, racing in the rain, laughing and heckling, then coming back the next week with the same group of people that enabled this. Working with friends is rad. If you are ever out at the Oregon coast, we’ve found our new favorite place to stay. Couldn’t recommend it more.