Stanwell Smooth Peewit w/ Bamboo 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.

In the years during and following the Second World War, good briar was scarce, and to weather this storm, many pipe companies went about rethinking pipe design altogether. One set of what George Kubler would call “linked solutions” was to simply use less briar per pipe, and one way of doing this was to replace a pipe’s shank with a different material entirely. Bamboo was an especially popular material for this purpose in the Anglophone world, such as in the case of Dunhill or Kaywoodie, and it was also especially popular in Denmark, where the briar shortage had been even more severe. Stanwell began making bamboo-shanked briars during the 1950s, likely under the influence of prominent Scandinavian artisans of the time. Sixten Ivarsson, who collaborated extensively with Stanwell, was very fond of bamboos, as were plenty of other artisans in Denmark and Sweden who weren’t associated with Poul Nielsen’s company, such as Poul Rasmussen, Emil Chonowitsch, and Bo Nordh. As it turned out, bamboo was also very popular with pipe smokers, and would remain a fixture in pipe design long after the post-war briar shortage had abated.

In terms of Stanwell, pipes with bamboo shank extensions have held a place in the company’s catalogs more or less continuously since their debut in the 1950s. But certain iterations of the Stanwell “Bamboo” have become more sought-after than others, as is the case with Stanwell pipes more generally. Part of this has to do with the ways Stanwell’s bamboo-shanked pipes reflected the shapes of contemporaneous catalogs; and part of it has to do with the freedom accorded to the persons carving these pipes. For example, 1950s “Bamboos” included what are now very rare, low volume classics, like the Nefertiti; in the later 20th century (purportedly around the 1970s), “Bamboo” pipes had a freehand touch to them, resulting in more unique designs. This one looks closer to the latter, though the stem logo suggests an early 1980s make. It’s certainly a classic, as despite it not featuring a shape number (as was often the case with such pipes until relatively recently), it is quite clearly based on the shape “30” egg, or acorn, shape, better known as the Peewit. Originally designed by Sixten Ivarsson in the 1930s, the Peewit shape became one of Ivarsson’s and Stanwell’s most famous shapes, and Ivarsson designed upwards of a dozen renditions of it for Stanwell during his career (further renditions were also designed for Stanwell by Tom Eltang in subsequent years). This one is closest to the updated shape 30 Peewit found in the 1982 catalog, also presumably designed by Sixten Ivarsson. Beautifully carved from plateaux briar, with consistent flame grain and bird’s-eye, it’s a far cry from the relatively staid designs of Stanwell’s most recent Bamboo line, or indeed much of anything that Stanwell has released for many years. As a Stanwell fan myself, I’ll confess that it will be little difficult for me to see this one leave.

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

Details:

Length: 6″ / 152.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.77 / 19.55mm

Bowl Depth: 1.66″ / 42.16mm

Weight: 1.5oz / 44g