Dunhill 1977 Root Briar 495 Smooth Dublin Estate Briar Pipe, English Estates

Description

To veteran pipe smokers, Dunhill needs no introduction. Beginning in 1907, Alfred Dunhill began selling Dunhill pipes at the tobacconist shop he owned on London’s Duke Street. Very quickly, these pipes gained the reputation of being the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of pipes due to how expertly crafted they were. Today, Dunhill is likely Britain’s most famous pipe manufacturer, and continues to produce some of the most treasured pipes a smoker can buy.

1977 was the year that Dunhill introduced its standardized shape system, shifting from a catalog filled with countless individual shapes to one in which the four main parts of any pipe design would be assigned a number (for a short while, there was a fifth digit, but that’s a matter for another listing). This made things easier for Dunhill and Dunhill customers to keep track of the shapes on offer, but it also meant that a lot of shapes simply disappeared. This is all the more unfortunate given that the 1970s saw Dunhill introducing a wide variety of distinctive and unorthodox shapes, which vanished by the decade’s end. The “495” is one I’ve only seen about twice before, with this one seeming to have been made mere months (or even weeks) before the introduction of Dunhill’s new system. It’s somewhere between a bent Dublin and a calabash, a hybrid that, nonetheless, has a very traditional look to it. This one is dressed in Dunhill’s high-end Root Briar finish, with only a simple, light top-coat.

The condition is fair. Chamber slightly over-reamed, general finish fading, and stem slightly over-buffed at the base.

 

Details:

Length: 6″ / 152.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.90 / 22.86mm

Bowl Depth: 1.48″ / 37.59mm

Weight: 1.4oz / 40g