HS Studio Sandblasted Long Shank Acorn w/ Ebonite 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.

There is a history to this pipe. Not in the sense of it being an old pipe, made many years ago, but in the sense of an evolution over time—something more akin to biology, and in more ways than one. 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. Both have become modern classics, as have the chubbier, shorter re-interpretations of Lars’ daughter Nanna Ivarsson. Here we find Hong Kong’s HS Studio paying homage to that Ivarssonian lineage, with especial preference toward Lars. In this instance, a more reserved, near-black finish has been chosen, though not without stifling the healthy amount of ring grain in the briar. While the finish is more in keeping with earlier post-war Scandinavian pipe making, one distinctly modern touch on this design is the inclusion of a green ebonite ferrule, which offsets the stummel and stem’s more modest tones.

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

 

Details:

Length: 6.5″ / 165.1mm

Bowl Width: 0.80 / 20.32mm

Bowl Depth: 1.54″ / 39.11mm

Weight: 1.8oz / 52g