HS Studio XL Smooth “Speeding” Freehand 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.

Writing about pipes all day can get quite exhausting, at least on one’s vocabulary. 99% of the pipes that you do talk about can be described with a pretty standard lexicon of names, adjectives, and stock phrases. That’s the nature of commodities, though: they tend to respond to established patterns of demand by meeting them, further contributing to a cycle whose output is greater and greater homogeneity. In other words, it’s not something you can complain about, and a lot of trends exist for a good reason (the Dublin, for example, is genuinely a well-suited shape for a pipe). It’s still nice, though, to have a pipe land on your desk that is very much out of the ordinary and, indeed, tests one’s ability to put it into words. What’s there to say about this HS Studio? Well, while there is definitely an emerging “Chinese style” among many of its artisans, this rolling wave of a freehand strikes as distinctly “Japanese.” Takeo Arita and Ichi Kitahara would be good points of reference, especially their ability to mix both “floral” and “speeding” motifs into their work. It’s almost like watching one of those sped-up time-lapse videos of a plant blossoming, with its leaves and petals spreading out and curling back in, and with a powerful sense of motion and momentum in caught in each frame.

Anyway, this pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating. It comes with its original sleeve.

 

Details:

Length: 7″ / 177.8mm

Bowl Width: 0.76 / 19.30mm

Bowl Depth: 1.68″ / 42.67mm

Weight: 2.1oz / 62g