Ardor: Meteora Bent Apple with Silver Tobacco Pipe

The Ardor workshop was established in 1974, its name being a portmanteau of its founders, Angelo Rovera and his son Dorelio Rovera. The family's tradition of pipe-making extends further, to 1911, when Angelo's father Francesco founded the Sociedade Rovera pipe company alongside his brothers. Even today, Ardor is carried on by Dorelio's sons Dimitri and Damiano. Housing a capacious chamber, this strapping bent Apple from Ardor is sure to provide leisurely smoking sessions. The bowl fills the palm easily, its hefty figure formed by thick, insulating walls curving up from the sweeping heel toward the subtly chamfered rim. Transitioning from the bowl is a muscular, upturned shank, which rounds out with a generous accent of silver at the shank end as it pairs to a smartly curved stem of swirling, coffee-hued acrylic. The stummel wears Ardor's Meteora finish, named after a rock formation in Greece upon which one of the largest complexes of Eastern Orthodox monasteries is built. Owing to its namesake, this finish boasts a wealth of textural variety as it dresses the surface with a rugged rustication set beneath a latticed arrangement of smooth, carved channels, granting an architectural quality, here stained with a warm, light hue.