Bari Wiking XL Smooth Panel Freehand Estate Briar Pipe, Danish Estates

Description

Bari was a pipe company founded in Kolding, Denmark, in 1950. Along with Stanwell, Bari was one of the first companies that started the Danish movement in pipe-making, offering innovative designs and propelling its founders and carvers into celebrity status within the pipe world. Bari’s founder was Viggo Nielsen, whose sons Kai Nielsen and Jørgen Nielsen joined him in working at Bari, along with other soon-to-be famous names such as Åge Bogelund. Though the Bari company is long gone, its legacy lives on in the artisan pipe scene as it exists today.

While “freehand” pipes are, by name and nature, freeform, suggesting an infinite world of possibilities, in reality the forms these pipes take are often quite uniform. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it can mean that the bar for “standing out” for such a pipe is somewhat higher than other designs. Viggo Nielsen’s Bari make cemented itself as a purveyor of excellent freehand pipes not only by virtue of helping to pioneer the genre of the Danish Fancy, but by offering pipes in that vein that were nonetheless distinctive and impressively well made. This one, for example, is a classic “Bari” style freehand, incorporating a mixture of naturalistic and geometric elements—elements which continue right the way to the cut of its ebonite mouthpiece. Considering the genuine boom in freehand pipe manufacturers in the 1960s and 1970s, its pipes like this one that are the reason Bari is remembered decades later, while so many other makes have been all but forgotten.

The condition is very good. Minor inner rim darkening, slight handling marks, and a small tooth indent in the mouthpiece, though nothing too major.

Details:

Length: 6.8″ / 172.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.81 / 20.57mm

Bowl Depth: 1.50″ / 38.10mm

Weight: 3.1oz / 89g