Herriot Pipes Partially Sandblasted Demiwarden Dublin Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

In 2003, one of France’s preeminent pipe luminaries, Erwin Van Hove, jubilantly proclaimed, “Hallelujah! One of the very best American artisans has recently settled on French soil.” Two decades later, Antoine Grenard, director of Chapuis-Comoy and president of the Confrérie des Maîtres-Pipiers de Saint-Claude, oversaw the induction of another artisan originally from the Anglophone world into its hallowed brotherhood. Van Hove was, of course, welcoming Trever Talbert. The Confrérie, on the other hand, was welcoming Chris Herriot. Parallels between the two are difficult to ignore; both were outsiders who laid down roots in France and, crucially, thrived by it. Both forged connections with the Francophone pipe community, developing friendships and associations that would help them lay the foundations of their respective brands. And both would build something on these foundations that garnered them significant national and international acclaim. In Herriot’s case, this meant apprenticing under Bruno Nuttens (himself a former student of Pierre Morel and Tom Eltang), spending several days each week laboring in Nuttens’ Charpey workshop, and the rest of his time in his own.

Chris Herriot cut his teeth on eminently traditional shapes, though there are still few that have been quite as traditional as this one. There’s a clear nod in its design to the tavern clays of centuries past, pipes which, historically, had a profound impact on the shapes adopted by early briars (the cutty and the Belge being the most obvious examples). Rather than a 1-1 copy, however, Herriot has taken those shapes and hybridized them with the briar Dublin shapes that came along much later, not unlike Reuben Charatan did in the 20th century. There’s a little of Reuben’s Bell Dublins to the bowl, in fact, though I could also see the “Arne Jacobsen” renditions popularized by Tom Eltang being of some influence in this instance.

Details:

Length: 7″ / 177.8mm

Bowl Width: 0.68 / 17.27mm

Bowl Depth: 1.53″ / 38.86mm

Weight:0.7oz / 20g