Remembering the rare Keim Cycles Arvak with a monocoque white ash frame (that you can apparently still buy for just under £10k)

It's time for another dive into the archive for this edition of Bike At Bedtime, and we're going back almost a decade to when we first set eyes on the curious, yet meticulously-crafted wooden frames from the innovative French project known as Keim Cycles. 

Though they look like concept bikes, Keim Cycles' Arvak luxury singlespeed city bike and its road bike model the Hanzo were (previously) living and breathing in a literal sense, because the frames are made using layers of white ash.

The unique process sees the monocoque frames constructed by vacuum-laminating the wooden layers, with resin between these layers to keep it all together. Bolted onto that was Keim's own one-piece head tube/handlebar combo called the OVL (Oriented Veneer Layup) and a carbon fork.

Pretty much all the bikes we saw at Bespoked 2015, the Berlin Bike Show in 2016 and around the internet show complete Keim Cycles builds with posh carbon wheels and high-end components. As all bikes are fully custom and made-to-measure, we're guessing Keim's average customer over the years wasn't short of a few bob, and after something unique and special. 

Keim's road bike model, the Honza, out in the wild

Full bikes are claimed to weigh in the region of 7.5kg according to the limited bits of info we can find on the Keim Cycles Facebook page and from articles online... and on the subject of limited information, what became of Keim Cycles anyway? 

Well, that Facebook page we mentioned hasn't been updated since 2022, and what was the Keim Cycles website now redirects to breitfuss.fr, a company 'specialising in the manufacture of technical parts, furniture and exceptional wooden objects'.

As one half of the brains behind Keim Cycles is a chap called Till Breitfuss - the other being French industrial designer Paule Guérin - we can only guess that Breitfuss expanded into other areas. Or perhaps the bikes - that are shown on the Breitfuss website - were always a side project.

We've reached out to Keim Cycles a couple of times to ask if the bikes are still in production, but haven't got an answer at the time of writing. What we did find was that there is a luxury mobility business with showrooms in Dubai, Macau and the US called TheArsenale that has the Arvak for sale on its website: "Visually it looks kind of crazy, creating a giant hole in the middle of the bike, and it adds a whole new thrill to ride", boasts the product description.

The listing has the price set at £9,627 and says all bikes are made to order, so we can only assume (yep, we've asked them about the bike too and no reply as of yet) that the bikes are now sold through TheArsenale. If anyone has tried one out, owns one or knows someone who owns one we'd love to know more anyway!

Check out our other Bikes at Bedtime here