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. Here we find Hong Kong’s HS Studio paying homage to that Ivarssonian lineage, with especial preference toward Lars.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original (slightly flaked) bowl coating.

Details:

Length: 6.4″ / 162.5mm

Bowl Width: 0.81 / 20.57mm

Bowl Depth: 1.26″ / 32.00mm

Weight: 1.6oz / 46g