Bennie Joe Rusticated Cherrywood w/ Horn Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

Bennie Joe Pipes are made by Bennie Joe, an Indonesian artisan based in Jakarta. A trained architect and part-time pipe-maker for much of his life, he took on the latter full-time after a downturn in the property market during the dark days of 2020 and after. An interesting aspect of Bennie Joe pipes is that they are made primarily with hand tools, rather than many of the woodworking machines pipe-makers employ. While the chambers and draft holes are drilled, the body of the pipe is formed using hand tools, creating genuinely freehand shapes reminiscent of those made in mid-century Denmark. It should come as no surprise that one of Bennie Joe’s heroes is the late, great, Bo Nordh.

This particular Bennie Joe is a wonderful mixture of styles. The shape is a cherrywood-style poker, a shape which has its roots in early French pipe-making, where the material used was wood from the cherry tree. It is is also dressed in a pebble-dash rustication highly evocative of Italian pipes, such as those of Castello, Savinelli, or Radice. Finally, the shaping approach leans toward the kinds of pokers and cherrywoods that have come out of the Danish scene, including older, horn accented designs, and more recent works, such as those of Mike Sebastian Bay. I was particularly impressed with the engineering on this one, as despite its unconventional shaping, it is also a sitter, just as pokers and cherrywoods traditionally were.

 

Details:

Length: 5.8″ / 147.3mm

Bowl Width: 0.87 / 22.09mm

Bowl Depth: 1.87″ / 47.49mm

Weight: 1.9oz / 56g