Peter Stokkebye Smooth Liverpool (A) Estate Briar Pipe, Danish Estates

Description

The Stokkebye family are giants in the tobacco world; their pipes are similarly renowned, but for a slightly different reason. This is because Stokkebye-brand pipes have been made, at different times, by different makers – typically, though not always, by Danish masters. Peter Stokkebye pipes were largely made by one seminal figure in Danish pipe-making by the name of Jorgen Larsen. Larsen began his career working for Stanwell, before embarking to create hand-made, high-grade pipes under his own name. A briar dust allergy would unfortunately cut Larsen’s career short, but not before he made his mark upon the high-grade scene, both through his pipes and through passing on his knowledge of pipe-making to figures such as Kazuhiro Fukuda and Smio Satou of the then-germinal Tsuge Ikebana workshop.

Sometimes you can’t beat the classics. But other times, you can beat the classics just by making subtle adjustments here and there. This was the ethos of the first wave of Scandinavian pipe-makers, such as Poul Rasmussen, Emil Chonowitsch, and the early Sixten Ivarsson, before Danish design became associated with more grandiose and avant-garde designs. And though he did make plenty of pipes that would be exemplars of the latter, it is that former ethos that Jørgen Larsen continued with the creation of this Peter Stokkebye. After all, it is a Liverpool, with its signature long, cylindrical shank and short tapered stem, but it also has a slightly broad, plump, bowl that leans closer to the brandy shape. This juxtaposition allows for an interesting and enjoyable play on pipe-making conventions, but it also modifies the bowl’s curvature to subtly shift the way its straight grain patterns warp as they travel up around toward the rim. This way, they mirror a similar warping travel of the adjacent straight grain around the shank and also to achieve a greater visual prominence. In other words, this shaping allows for a more cohesive composition and for the grain to really “pop.”

The condition is excellent. Very minor finish fading on the rim and some slight residual oxidation on the stem, but this pipe was nonetheless preserved very carefully by its previous owner.

 

Details:

Length: 6″ / 152.4mm

Bowl Width: 0.77 / 19.55mm

Bowl Depth: 1.39″ / 35.30mm

Weight: 1.9oz / 56g