Peter Matzhold Smooth Lovat w/ Horn Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

It would not be unreasonable to say that Peter Matzhold is one of Austria’s foremost living pipe-maker—if not the foremost living pipe-maker from Austria. Nor would it be to say that he is one of the foremost living pipe-makers in the entire German-speaking region of Europe, rivaled only by other masters such as Wolfgang Becker. Originally trained and employed as an architect, Matzhold began his full-time career as a pipe-maker in 1978. He achieved considerable success in the latter and now has over four decades’ worth of experience in the craft—something plainly evident from the quality of his work.

Despite the region’s profound influence on pipe making since the early post-war decades, Peter Matzhold’s pipes tend to be quite different from Scandinavian briars, with his designs—at the risk of being reductive—often employing architectural motifs, or at least being evocative of such forms. But, when his pipes are a little more “Danish,” it is by virtue of their closeness to a particular, naturalized Dane, who was originally born in Matzhold’s neighboring Germany: Ingo Garbe. Like Garbe, many of Matzhold’s pipes are, at their core, traditional Anglo-French shapes, but which have been subtly subverted, creating something that is at once old and new. Matzold’s rendition of a Lovat here, for example, strikes at first as quite classical, but soon distinguishes itself, most prominently at the intersection of bowl and shank, and at the pipe’s stem. In the case of the former, Matzhold employs a common technique in Danish design, utilized to varying degrees by carvers from Garbe to Balleby, of “overshaping” the bowl. The result is something that is fuller, rounder, and more organic and which effects a visual separation of the bowl from the shank (allowing, in this instance, for a greater expression of the pipe’s grain, as seen in the sublime bird’s-eye on this one). Then, there’s the stem, and while horn inlays and flares are hardly novel in handmade pipes, the style seen here is something of a signature of Matzhold’s. Separating from the stummel in one single piece, it is comprised of a band of horn sandwiched between a flush ring and a pronounced “disk” of ebonite, out of which emerges a distinctive, fantail saddle.

This pipe is completely unsmoked. It comes with its original leather sleeve.

 

Details:

Length: 5.7″ / 144.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.82 / 20.82mm

Bowl Depth: 1.65″ / 41.91mm

Weight: 1.7oz / 50g