Azure Magazine - "Beau Lake Brings Beauty and Craftsmanship to the Cottage"

Azure Magazine - "Beau Lake Brings Beauty and Craftsmanship to the Cottage"

Founded by Lee Klein and Paul Lavoie, Beau Lake is an outdoor sports gear company focused on quality design. With its high-performance paddle boards, pedal boats and dock chairs, the brand is making waterside recreation a thing of beauty.

Last week, the Toronto showroom Klaus introduced a new take on a Canadian classic – the Adirondack. Made by Beau Lake in durable black locust – an eco-friendly alternative to Brazilian IPE – the Great Lakes Chair is an update, with marine-quality stainless steel hardware, that puts the focus on timelessness, durability and aesthetics.

It also represents the core ethos of Beau Lake’s entire collection, which was inspired by the waterside upbringing of founders Lee Klein (who grew up on summer sails in Lake Ontario, bottom right) and Paul Lavoie, the founder of celebrated creative ad agency TAXI.

Their line includes a series of paddle boards with the kind of polished detailing one would expect from a luxury sports car. For instance, Muskoka is a hand-shaped board that features a custom finish of mahogany and maple, coated with highly polished UV-resistant polyurethane.

Even more impressive, Rapid is a 14-foot carbon fibre and Macassar ebony wood board conceived, in collaboration with surfer, boarder and designer Julien Fillon, as a weekend racer.

In the near future, the company will release numerous other designs that take the cottage experience to the next level. One of those is the Beau Lake Runabout, a human-powered pedal boat reinvented “as an elegant, comfortable, and precision-engineered day trip cruiser,” according to the studio.

Further down the road is a series of accessories (from blankets to safety gear) and a new line of prefab cabins in saunas to be created in tandem with Fogo Island architect Todd Saunders.

If you can’t wait to get your hands on a sleek Beau Lake paddle board, you can subscribe to Azure for a chance at winning one.