Gregor Lobnik Contrast Sandbasted Dublin w/ Horn Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Gregor Lobnik is a Slovenian artisan pipe-maker, currently living in Kamnica, not far from the Slovenian-Austrian border. Lobnik was originally self taught, showing enough natural talent to be a runner-up in the 2004 Pipes & Tobaccos pipe carving contest. However, he would soon after take advantage of his particular geographical homebase to connect with another artisan one nation over: Peter Matzhold. Lobnik and Matzhold became good friends, with Matzhold also acting as something of a mentor to help Lobnik further his craft. Though Matzhold helped Lobnik refine his technique and was an influence on Lobnik’s style early on, Lobnik would ultimately cultivate a style far more of his own, one embodying a synthesis of Danish, Austrian, and Eastern European design philosophies.

Though I find their respective styles to be very different, I’d wager that one thing that rubbed off on Lobnik from his friend and mentor, the architect-turned-pipe maker Peter Matzhold, is an exacting sense of proportion. Freehand, Danish Dublins like this ones come in all sorts of guises, but calculating the right ratio of bowl height to shank length, and either to the length of the stem, can make or break a design. This one from Lobnik, on the other hand, is pretty much perfect, to the point where I did strongly contemplate keeping it for myself. Even if we set the basic form aside, the finish is genuinely gorgeous, mixing a horizontal, ring grain sandblast with a contrast stain that brings the bowl’s vertical grain into relief, creating, as the idiom goes, a rich tapestry. Offsetting the black and brown hues of the bowl and ebonite stem is a ferrule cut from what looks to be horn, with each of the three components acting as foils to further set one another off.

This pipe is completely unsmoked and comes with its original sleeve.

 

Details:

Length: 5.7″ / 144.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.73 / 18.54mm

Bowl Depth: 1.50″ / 38.10mm

Weight: 1.3oz / 38g