Every year, we document and write about hundreds of Beautiful Bicycles. Our detail-filled galleries are the best and most thorough on the ‘net. So at the end of each year, we like to look back and compile a list of our Top Ten Beautiful Bicycles. For the Top Ten Beautiful Bicycles of 2025, we looked at pageviews, comments, and social media chatter from twelve months of content to determine what bikes best represent a calendar year at The Radavist.
To up the ante, we’ve included our Handmade Showcase Awards featuring bikes from the Made Bike Show and Bespoked. Let’s get to it!
10: Jay’s La Marche Single Speed 29er
Jay from You Bet!, a Nevada City, California-based bike shop, had several stunning builds featured here over the past year, but you all really loved his La Marche Bike Co. singlespeed 29er. Rigid, non-suspension-corrected mountain bikes have a proper stance, especially when the proportions are so well balanced. Tom La Marche has an eye for singlespeeds and Jay knows how to build ’em!
09: Josh Becker’s Onko Rinkus Basket Bike
After Josh Becker got hit by a car while riding his beloved Onko Rinkus basket bike, the bike was repaired. Josh’s heartfelt story about tragedy turned triumph showcased that steel is indeed real. And that the bonds we form with our most prized possessions are equally as malleable. Rebuilt and stronger than ever before, this Beautiful Bicycle is ready for taking on the mountains of Santa Cruz once again.
08: Tasshi’s Breezer Beamer
Originally planned as an article about one of the many Softride models available in the early to mid-1990s, this Breezer Beamer article blew up. Sourced as a frame and built up with parts by The Vintage MTB Workshop, Tasshi joked with John that a gallery of this build would be extreme clickbait. He wasn’t wrong. Maybe it’s the purple frame and parts, or the frame bag, or perhaps the Softride stem? For whatever reason, this bike caught the eye.
07: Angel’s Maxway Cycles Zephyrus Road Bike
Maxway Cycles is a Taiwan-based framebuilding enterprise that has built thousands of steel bikes since its founding in 1987. For Angel Chui, working with her family at Maxway allows her to pour her creative energy into the company’s in-house brand. The inspiration for the Zephyrus was a conversation she had in the Maxway Taipei Show booth:
“At last year’s Taipei Show, a friend’s friend came by the booth and said, ‘Oh, so you only make steel bikes? That’s why I’ve never seen them. Steel bikes are low-end.’
I was honestly pretty mad. I wanted revenge. I wanted to show that steel can be more than just classic bikes. Steel can be high-performance.”
— Angel Chiu
Angel and the Maxway team’s hard work was wonderfully documented by Daniel Yang at the 2025 Taipei Show.
06: Apogee One from the Wolf Tooth booth at Sea Otter
Not surprisingly, we have a few bikes in our Top Ten Beautiful Bicycles list from this year’s Sea Otter Reportage. John and Spencer combed the dusty aisles of Laguna Seca looking for eye candy to fill several galleries for you all to enjoy. A few of those findings made their way into special feature galleries, including this Apogee One build from the team at Wolf Tooth.
The cement grey-to-clay ombré fade, Intend BC parts, and custom-anodized Free Float Module caught our eyes immediately. It’s no wonder this platform won MTB of the Year in our 2025 Product Awards!
05: Tyler’s Falconer Titanium Gravel Bike
Cameron Falconer has been offering titanium frames since we showcased his personal hardtail mountain touring bike two years ago. In that time, he’s made a few titanium gravel bikes, including Tyler’s. But this isn’t your typical framebuilder offering in that space. In typical Falconer manner, all of the frame parts were machined in-house, including those dropouts, which, as Cam said after the fact, “I made two sets of those dropouts on manual machines. Tyler got one, I got the other. Probably won’t do that again, lots of time and breathing coolant…”
In a sea of lookalike titanium gravel bikes, it’s the little details like that which make a Falconer stand out.
04: Significant Other Ded Reckin Full Suspension
Titanium and steel full suspension bikes are the future, and you’re looking at one of the finest in the genre. Ashley King’s Significant Other offerings at the 2025 Made Bike Show were all show stoppers, but it was this bike that convinced John it needed a gallery of its own. At the end of last year, Ashley posted a frame pre-order for the Ded Reckin to make it become a reality. Meanwhile, John’s still drooling over this bike. Clearly, you were too.
03: Tree’s Retrotec Kickback Kroozr Brake
There’s Tinker Tantrums, and then there’s Tinker Tirades! Patrick “Tree” Miller is a tinkerer by nature, and his latest project caused so much pause over here that we had to dispatch Santa Cruz-based photographer Josh Becker to document the madness. The end product is nothing short of original. This “Kroozr Brake” bike is a custom Retrotec that features a kickback-actuated rear disc brake, and it’s not to be missed!
02: Ronnie and His Ron’s Bikes CR1
It wouldn’t be a Radavist Top Ten Beautiful Bicycles list without a rim brake bike! At the 2025 Made Bike Show, the tanned internet sensation that is Ronnie Romance penciled in thirty minutes of his limited time to reconnect with John Watson for a special photoshoot of his Hint o’ Mint Safari Ron’s Bikes CR1 country road bike. Willing to “bare it all” in this one, Ronnie dons skimpy cycling attire in the photos, but it’s the reflections on reconnecting with his inner roadie that brought the boys to the yard. Depending on your work environment, some of these photos might be NSFW!
01: Chris Killer Designs – Killer Drop Hardtail
To be honest here: we knew this bike would land in the Top Ten Beautiful Bicycles list of 2025 when it made its way into our Sea Otter Reportage. How could it not? Chris Killer is a mechanical design engineer based in Costa Mesa, California, just outside of the city of Laguna Beach, where he loves to ride in the San Joaquin Hills. Living in Southern California, the riding is very steep, both up and down.
Within these local rides, Chris came up with the concept for the Killer Drop. But it wasn’t until he was stranded in China during the pandemic that he was able to spend a few weeks sketching out the design with SolidWorks. Once he was able to return home, he got to work on the concept. We were lucky enough to catch him at Sea Otter and document this creative design.
Congrats, Chris!
Handmade Showcase Awards
The Radavist is regarded as the premier website for framebuilder showcases. Each year, we travel the globe documenting the work of framebuilders with deep, rich galleries that showcase each of these Beautiful Bicycles and the people who create them by hand. For this year’s Showcase Awards, our editorial team picked Best Drop Bar, MTB, Utility, and Finish…
Best Handmade Show Drop Bar: Avalanche Cycles Ti Truss
Paris’s Avalanche Cycles brought several show-stoppers to the 2025 Bespoked Dresden showcase, but this titanium gravel bike with a custom titanium truss fork won our hearts over. Marie’s execution here is flawless. From the design, construction, finish, and build, it is without a doubt our favorite drop bar bike from this year’s framebuilder showcases.
Best Handmade Show MTB: Rare Earth Holy Mountain Full Suspension
John first linked up with Brian from Rare Earth after he finished the Baja Divide in 2023, and again in 2024 after he completed the Tour Divide. Brian’s work stands out in the US framebuilding scene with unique designs and finishes. Needless to say, we were completely unprepared for this 2025 Made Bike Show offering: the Holy Mountain. With plentiful framebag space and lots of intricate detailing, this steel full-squish creation is a moving work of art that begs to be ridden.
Best Handmade Show Utility Bike: Drust Mini Collapsible Cargo
This bike debuted in John’s Drust Cycles Shop Visit a few days before the 2025 Bespoked Dresden Show, and we’re glad we got to shoot it before the madness. During the entire Bespoked show, Konstantin Drust was inundated with questions about this collapsible cargo bike. After years of effort and creativity, it is unlike anything else on the market. The final product feels like a culmination of everything the Drust Cycles brand has become: beautiful, functional, utilitarian art.
Best finish: True Love Heartbreaker Light
Framebuilder showcases are full of stunning finishes, but Jan from True Love Cycles dialed it up to eleven with this Heartbreaker Light at the 2025 Bespoked Dresden show. Unlike paint, powder, or Cerakote, this multi-hued finish is the result of bluing the frame with a torch, literally transforming the metal itself. John’s moody photos put this frame on a well-deserved blast! Well done, Jan.
Well, that’s it for our Top Ten Beautiful Bicycles of 2025 and Handmade Showcase Awards. Let us know in the comments if your pick made the list!