Herriot Pipes Partially Sandblasted Egg 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.

Over the last year or so, Chris Herriot has, like his mentor Bruno Nuttens, spent a good amount of time in Denmark, on the invitation of Tom Eltang. And, just like Nuttens, Herriot has spent plenty of time studying under the Danish legend in his Copenhagen workshop. It was through Eltang that Herriot was able to brush up on his freehand shaping, for example, allowing Herriot to access shapes that he had previously shied away from. It’s also given rise to a very interesting synthesis of Danish and Anglo-French design philosophies in a significant portion of Herriot’s work.

In the case of this one, it’s certainly a more bulbous, egg-like bent than most shapes one would find on an English or French factory chart, though it doesn’t have quite the same ballooning figure associated with Danish renditions in that vein. When the pipe first landed on my desk, I was actually somewhat reminded of certain very early Peterson shapes, like the stubby, chubby “9B” and “9BC,” though with a little less weight and a little more modernness to its finishing and color palette.

Details:

Length: 5″ / 127.0mm

Bowl Width: 0.72 / 18.28mm

Bowl Depth: 1.47″ / 37.33mm

Weight: 1.0oz / 30g