HS Studio “Lars Ivarsson” Sandblasted Acorn Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

If you’ve been keeping up with the world of Chinese pipe making, their artisan scene has been really taking off over the last decade. Like the great Danish institutions of old, many of these pipes are produced in artisan workshops such as Zhiputang, Qi Studio, and GH Zhang. Hong Kong’s HS Studio follows a similar model, with a team of expert in-house carvers crafting high-quality briars in a variety of styles.

There is a history to this pipe. Not in the sense of it being an old pipe, made many years ago, but in the sense of an evolution over time—something more akin to biology, and in more ways than one. In the late 1940s, Sixten Ivarsson and a few other enterprising Scandinavian pipe makers begin to revolutionize pipe design, taking shapes that were long-established staples of pipe making and turning them into something quite different. One of these shapes was the acorn, a shape already present in French pipe design, that Sixten Ivarsson tweaked and modified into something that was genuinely his own, producing numerous renditions across his long career. Soon enough, his son Lars Ivarsson is making pipes too, and he also finds a fondness for acorn shapes. But instead of his father’s petite, slender interpretations, Lars Ivarsson opts for a more muscular design, offset by the most graceful curvature from shank end to bowl. Both have become modern classics, as have the chubbier, shorter re-interpretations of Lars’ daughter Nanna Ivarsson. And so, here we are, with a crisp, ring grain sandblast homage by HS Studio to the late Lars variation, who I imagine—as with so many others—will have been one of their heroes in the craft.

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

Details:

Length: 6.5″ / 165.1mm

Bowl Width: 0.77 / 19.55mm

Bowl Depth: 1.41″ / 35.81mm

Weight: 1.9oz / 54g