The Cucchiara came about after winning a Holy Foam event on a board with very similar proportions. Wide nose. Parallel outline. It looked a little different from what I was used to riding.
After the contest I kept surfing it. It paddled really well thanks to the fuller nose, but never at the expense of performance. Keeping the centre narrow meant it still felt responsive and easy to control.
I wasn't trying to build a faster twin.
There are already plenty of fast twins.
I wanted to build a twin that gave me more control over speed.
Twins have always given me plenty of speed. What I was looking for was a little more control once the waves started pushing.
The Cucchiara lets you slow things down when you need to. Set a rail, draw your line, then go again. The more wall and push a wave has, the more at home it feels.
It's not an everyday board. You have to read the wave well to get the best out of it.
Twins have always pushed me towards a more horizontal approach. High lines, cutbacks and speed. The Cucchiara made me enjoy a more vertical style of surfing, looking for the pocket and the steepest part of the wave.
It does its best work in clean conditions, open faces and well-formed waves. Give it some push and it'll happily handle waves much bigger than its outline might suggest.
Where a lot of twins start feeling nervous, the Cucchiara settles in, holds its line and keeps driving.
One of the biggest surprises for me has been how much I enjoy surfing it backside. That's something I rarely find in a twin.
For surfers looking for something even closer to a shortboard, I also build it as a round tail with a five-fin setup.

In this version, the board has more rocker through both the nose and tail, with a noticeably deeper concave through the bottom. This makes it feel more alive under your feet and helps it generate more speed, making it work better in smaller surf too. It becomes less of a board you need to listen to, and more of a versatile, everyday option.

The round version can also be set up as a twin, though I prefer it in slightly bigger sizes. It’s not a midlength, but a generously volumed shortboard. With the five-fin setup, sized down to more traditional shortboard dimensions, it becomes a proper all-round shortboard: the workhorse of my quiver.
It doesn't replace a classic twin. It has its own place in the quiver and offers something different.​

My Cucchiara is 6' x 19" x 2" 1/2. I’m 1.83 m tall (6'0") and usually weigh around 78–80 kg (172–176 lbs).