HS Studio Sandblasted Acorn w/ Boxwood Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

If you’ve been keeping up with the world of Chinese pipe making, their artisan scene has been really taking off over the last decade. Like the great Danish institutions of old, many of these pipes are produced in artisan workshops such as Zhiputang, Qi Studio, and GH Zhang. Hong Kong’s HS Studio follows a similar model, with a team of expert in-house carvers crafting high-quality briars in a variety of styles.

I’ve noted before that many HS Studio pipes show clear influences from the greats of post-war pipe making history, and that, often, this takes the form of a clear homage to one particular maker. This one, to me at least, looks like an example of the latter. And the maker in question would be one of Denmark’s finest living artisans: Nanna Ivarsson. As I mentioned in a previous listing regarding what looked to be a Lars Ivarsson homage, there is a sort of “evolution” that takes place when looking at the pipes of the Ivarsson family, with certain shapes passing down from Sixten Ivarsson, to his son Lars Ivarsson, to Lars’ daughter Nanna Ivarsson, and with each successive generation interpreting those shapes in different ways. Sixten Ivarsson, for example, takes a relatively common Anglo-French acorn shape and transforms it into designs like the Peewit, stretching the essential form into something almost unrecognizably sleek and slender. Lars’ acorns, on the other hand, were heftier, with more muscle behind them, while retaining much of the length and grace of Sixten’s renditions. Then we come to Nanna Ivarsson, whose acorns are drastically shorter and stubbier than those of her father, while also being proportionally wider, to the point where they take on a plumpness more common to tomato shapes, yet while still retaining the seed (excuse the pun) of the acorns of Lars and of Sixten. This ring grain sandblast acorn from HS Studio is by no means a copy of any one particular Nanna Ivarsson pipe, but I’d imagine that it is an expression of admiration in the form of a very faithful homage.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating.

 

Details:

Length: 4.5″ / 114.3mm

Bowl Width: 0.75 / 19.05mm

Bowl Depth: 1.05″ / 26.67mm

Weight: 1.3oz / 38g