HS Studio Sandblasted Egg Churchwarden w/ Bamboo 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.

In the context of Western pipe making, bamboo rose to prominence as a simple means of saving on briar during post-war shortages, but it quickly grew to be appreciated for its aesthetic and functional properties. Bamboo stuck around long after briar scarcity stopped being a pressing concern, and remains a staple in pipe design to this day. More recently, however, artisans and workshops have realized that one can do some pretty wild things with bamboo shank extensions, especially when it comes to a pipe’s curvature. This pitcher-style egg from HS Studio takes things even further than most as far as that goes, taking the form of a churchwarden with a shank extension that is simply wild in both length and curvature. It’s a novel design if I ever saw one.

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

Details:

Length: 7.8″ / 198.1mm

Bowl Width: 0.81 / 20.57mm

Bowl Depth: 1.41″ / 35.81mm

Weight: 1.4oz / 42g