Stanwell c.1960s-70s Reg Era Hand Made Smooth Bent Billiard Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Stanwell is one of Denmark’s most celebrated and enduring pipe companies, having been founded by Poul Nielsen shortly after the second world war. Over the last six decades, Stanwell has established itself as both a leader in innovative Danish design and for producing well-priced pipes with precision construction and engineering. Many of its designs were created for the company by iconic pipe-makers in the Scandinavian scene, such as Sixten Ivarsson, Anne Julie, Jess Chonowitsch, and Tom Eltang.

While its reputation would ultimately come to hinge on the distinctly Danish nature of its designs, Poul Nielsen’s pipe company began with the intention of competing with English briars, and its founding shapes reflected that intention. The earliest surviving Stanwell catalogs are filled with dozens of billiard and bent billiard renditions, almost to the point of rivaling those of mid-century Dunhill in sheer number, and while Stanwell did begin a dramatic shift toward more modern pipes from the 1950s onward, the company never completely abandoned classical shapes. The shape “85” bent billiard remained in Stanwell’s catalog for several decades, which is a testament to the timelessness of such shapes (though its mouthpiece was switched from a saddle to a taper in the 1990s), but this one is far from recent. Judging by the truncated registration number stamp and thin, white crowned “S” stem logo, this pipe will have been made prior to the early 1980s. I’d imagine it to be a 1970s make, or late 1960s at the earliest, as Stanwell was still using the “85” code for an old Sixten Ivarsson design at the beginning of the 1960s. The pipe furthermore comes from Stanwell’s higher-end Hand Made line, which expresses itself quite prominently in the burst of bird’s-eye at each of the bowl’s flanks.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating, and comes with its box and sleeve. Some small scratches on the bowl, though nothing major.

Details:

Length: 5.6″ / 142.2mm

Bowl Width: 0.85 / 21.59mm

Bowl Depth: 1.70″ / 43.18mm

Weight: 1.5oz / 44g