Stanwell Reg Era 09 Hand Made Smooth Panel Billiard Estate Briar Pipe, Danish Estates

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.

Stanwell’s shape “09” is by no means easy to describe. Let’s start with the simpler aspects: it was not the first shape 09 in Stanwell’s catalog, but rather replaced an earlier version, which was a simpler stacked Dublin. Surviving catalogs place its debut around the later 1960s-1970s, by which time Stanwell was producing pipes far closer to the “Danish” style than in earlier decades. Both 09 shapes were, however, designed by Sixten Ivarsson, and similarities to the 1970s 09 are certainly present in shapes he had designed much earlier, such as the 1950s “02” and the 1960s “1240.” By the time of a catalog from around 1982, the shape is absent, with production seemingly discontinued. Perhaps as a result, it is quite uncommon today.
As for the design itself, while a glance at the pipe’s side profile shows a somewhat jaunty brandy with a curiously complex mouthpiece, the bowl is in fact more like a rounded triangular prism, with a flattened plane at its fore. It’s strange, but it also gives the pipe a good hand-feel, perhaps a deliberate choice by Sixten Ivarsson owing to his functionalist inclinations.

The condition is good. Some darkening and scratches on the rim, slight handling marks on the bowl, and some slight, residual oxidation on the stem.

 

Details:

Length: 5.5″ / 139.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.83 / 21.08mm

Bowl Depth: 1.64″ / 41.65mm

Weight: 1.6oz / 48g