The Lake Como EDITION: Where Art Meets the Water

At Lake Como Design Festival 2026, Beau Lake and Argentinian artist and designer Conie Vallese presented a limited-edition series of handcrafted paddleboards created specifically for one of the world’s most storied lakes.

There are few places where design and landscape feel as inseparable as Lake Como.

For the 2026 Lake Como Design Festival, Beau Lake collaborated with Argentinian artist and designer Conie Vallese on a series of handcrafted paddleboards adorned with sculptural elements. Presented at The Lake Como EDITION from September 12–20, 2026, the collaboration brought Vallese’s sculptural botanical forms together with Beau Lake’s approach to mid-century modern design and craftsmanship.

The result sits somewhere between watercraft and collectible design: an object intended to perform on the water while belonging naturally within its surroundings.

A new canvas for Conie Vallese

Vallese works across art, design, fashion and craft, with a practice that explores botanical and organic forms through sculpture and collectible design. For the Lake Como project, that visual language found an unexpected new canvas.

Working from her studio, Vallese created individual floral and organic sculptural elements for the nose and tail of each board. The pieces were subsequently forged in white bronze outside Toronto, preserving the irregularities and traces of the artist’s hand.

Placed against the precise surfaces of a Beau Lake paddleboard, the sculptures create a deliberate tension: organic against engineered, delicate against functional, art against an object designed for movement.

Crafted for Lake Como

Each 3.5-metre all-around paddleboard was handcrafted by Beau Lake. A recycled EPS foam core encased in fiberglass forms the structure, finished with a bespoke layup of FSC-certified mahogany and holly wood veneer. A restrained silver-champagne palette surrounds the timber, while layers of ultra-glossy, UV-resistant clear coat create the reflective finish.

The materials are beautiful, but they remain purposeful. These are not sculptures made to resemble paddleboards. They are functioning watercraft, designed to be taken onto the lake.

Design in dialogue with place

The setting was as much a part of the project as the object itself.

Presented at The Lake Como EDITION during the eighth edition of Lake Como Design Festival, the collaboration appeared within a programme centred on contemporary art, design and culture. The 2026 festival theme, Confine — “Boundary” — provided a particularly fitting context.

The boards occupy their own boundaries: between art and function, hand-making and engineering, land and water.

Against Lake Como’s architecture, mountains and long traditions of craftsmanship and leisure, those distinctions begin to feel less important.

Objects made for the water

Beau Lake has always approached watercraft as more than equipment.

The Lake Como EDITION takes that idea further. Vallese’s sculptures don’t simply decorate an existing object; they change how the paddleboard is perceived. Details normally dictated entirely by performance become opportunities for artistic expression.

Yet the board retains its purpose.

It is perhaps this combination that makes the collaboration feel so at home on Lake Como: craftsmanship without excess, beauty with utility, and an object designed not simply to be seen beside the water, but to become part of it.