It started with a single request for a wooden bike stand. Now Millard Bautista Designs is quietly building an entire ecosystem of bike storage.
The Collingwood-based duo first made waves with their clean, CNC-cut wooden bike stands. Then a friend sent them a photo from an Airbnb, and everything shifted from floor to wall.
“Our friend Andrew Lansdale, he saw something on a wall and sent us the pictures like, ‘you guys should do something like this,’” says designer and co-owner Venecia Bautista. “And we thought how do you make it so modular so you can send it to market? It’s a great idea.”
The result is the Trail Grid Series, a modular storage system that takes the same Baltic birch and phenolic finish from their stands and turns it into a tidy, wall-mounted grid for bikes and gear.
“The Trail Grid is essentially a storage component system that’s modular,” Bautista says. “So all the components that you use are for mountain biking, road biking or any of the biking modalities that are out there.”
Baltic birch, French cleats and a lot of CNC
Like their stands, the Trail Grid panels are made from FSC-certified Baltic birch plywood with a black phenolic coating. It sounds nerdy until you actually live with one in a garage.
“The application of that material is great. Just the durability of it,” Bautista says.
The grids mount to the wall using a French cleat system. A cleat is screwed into the studs, then the panel hooks on.
“We thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the things were not set in place you could remove them and add whatever you want,” Bautista says. “So yeah, the idea came from a friend and then we just went with it and took it nuclear.”
Once the panel is up, the fun starts. Riders can add vertical or horizontal bike mounts, shelves, shallow shelves, cubbies and hooks in whatever configuration makes sense.
“We’re making two different attachments to hang your bike, one by the front tire and one by two tires. It’s more of a horizontal attachment,” she says. “We have four different sizes of shelves. We have small hooks and large hooks, shallow shelves as well. There’s a cubby.
Trail today, Snow and Summit tomorrow
Trail is just the start.
“By the way, we call it the Trail Grid Series because we also have a Snow (ski/ snowboard gear) and a Summit (climbing gear) Grid Series,” Bautista explains. “Once you have the grid, all components from the different series can be used on the same grid,…
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