Bruno Nuttens Heritage H3 Smooth Dublin Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Starting out as a pipe restorer, Belgian artisan Bruno Nuttens moved onto producing his own pipes under the careful guidance of France’s most esteemed master pipe makers, Pierre Morel Jr. Nuttens’ first pipes creating relatively traditional pipes—often using carefully selected, decades-seasoned stummels from France’s historic Saint-Claude factories—but he would soon begin developing entirely handmade pipes in styles that seamlessly blended the old with the new. In the case of the latter, Nuttens was no doubt aided by time spent in the workshop of Danish legend Tom Eltang, where he further developed the skills and techniques behind his craft. Nuttens made such an impact in Denmark, in fact, that he’s been commissioned three times to develop the Stokkebye Pipe of the Year, a number rivaled only by Eltang himself. Today, Nuttens continues to craft high-grade pipes in a variety of styles, including his signature “Bing” and “Twiggy” shapes.

Briar is by no means inexpensive, and even briar sourced from the finest cutters in the world may well end up with sandpits and fissures that render it completely unusable as far as pipe making goes. Bruno Nuttens capitalized on something of a secret, however, when he came up with his Heritage series: that there are, in certain places around the world, warehouses filled with briar in the form of pre-turned stummels that never got a chance to be finished. In a pipe factory, for example, each person has a role, and one of these roles is turning stummel after stummel and passing them on to the next department, where they are sanded, fitted with stems, stained, polished, etc. But what happens when there is a decline in the pipe market, as occurred in the later decades of the 20th century? Production slows, or perhaps stops altogether, and a lot of those aforementioned stummels are stored for later use—if that time should ever come at all. Bruno Nuttens used his contacts in Saint Claude, one of the pipe making powerhouses of the 20th century, to get his hands on the best of these well-aged stummels, turning them into his Heritage series. This one is a featherweight bent Dublin, and a pretty magnificent one at that.

This pipe is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coating. It comes with its original sleeve.

 

Details:

Length: 5.7″ / 144.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.73 / 18.54mm

Bowl Depth: 1.52″ / 38.60mm

Weight: 0.9oz / 26g