HS Studio Sandblasted Long Shank 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.

As with so many of the HS Studio pipes that found themselves in our estates pipeline last year, there’s a lot going on with this one. And, like one in particular, explaining this one requires a brief history recap.
In the late 1940s, Sixten Ivarsson and a few other enterprising Scandinavian pipe makers begin to revolutionize pipe design, taking shapes that were long-established staples of pipe making and turning them into something quite different. One of these shapes was the acorn, a shape already present in French pipe design, that Sixten Ivarsson tweaked and modified into something that was genuinely his own, producing numerous renditions across his long career. Soon enough, his son Lars Ivarsson is making pipes too, and he also finds a fondness for acorn shapes. But instead of his father’s petite, slender interpretations, Lars Ivarsson opts for a more muscular design, offset by the most graceful curvature from shank end to bowl. When Lars’ daughter Nanna enters the scene, she has her own take on the “Ivarssonian” acorn, this time tending to compress the shape in length, while expanding its breadth, resulting in something slightly more bulbous, or even “chubby.” All three successive generations of Ivarssons have their acorn renditions, and all are hugely influential on artisans around the world. This one is is clearly more of a Lars homage, but also follows a more contemporary trend in taking shapes from Lars’ portfolio and slimming them down some, resulting in a kind of Sixten-Lars hybrid, not to metion a great looking pipe. While this one has a squat bowl with a reserved black sandblast, it nonetheless has some great ring grain, along with a well-matched off-white boxwood accent.

This pipe is completely unsmoked. There’s some slight stem oxidation, but nothing major. As the pipe is new old stock, I’ve opted to simply leave it as is and let its buyer do with it as they see fit.

 

Details:

Length: 7.4″ / 187.9mm

Bowl Width: 0.79 / 20.06mm

Bowl Depth: 1.21″ / 30.73mm

Weight: 1.6oz / 46g