Alexander Tupitsyn Sandblasted Egg Handmade Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

Beginning his career as an apprentice to master Vladimir Grechukhin in the early 2000s, Alexander Tupitsyn quickly rose to becoming one of the preeminent members of the “St Petersburg school” of pipe-making. Along with Sergey Dyomin (another former Grechukhin apprentice), Tupitsyn and Grechukhin are responsible for PS Studio, a laboratory where the three experiment and collaborate on highly sought-after smoking instruments. Having been mentored by Grechukhin, as well as Denmark’s Poul Ilsted, by the early 2010s Tupitsyn was soon crafting high-grade pieces under his own name. These days, Tupitsyn’s pipes are scarce in the Western world, and when they do occasionally turn up on the estates market, they are snapped up almost as soon as they appear.

I have wondered for a while now how one might compare the pipes of the St Petersburg school with their forebears and contemporaries abroad. One thing that did spring to mind was muscle. While, say, Danish carvers like Former, Balleby, or Nanna Ivarsson have a predilection for voluptuous, even “chubby,” designs, Tupitsyn and his colleagues tend to reinterpret many of the same underlying shapes, but more heft and brawn instead. This particular Tupitsyn would certainly fit that description, rendering the familiar Danish staple of the bent egg in a form that almost resembles a tensed bicep. This underlying form has been dressed in a crisp, contrast sandblast and capped with a ferrule that I think is palm wood, finishing with a stem of black ebonite.

This Tupitsyn is completely unsmoked, with an original bowl coaitng. It comes with its original leather sleeve.

 

Details:

Length: 5″ / 127.0mm

Bowl Width: 0.74 / 18.79mm

Bowl Depth: 1.59″ / 40.38mm

Weight: 1.9oz / 56g