Chris Asteriou: Smooth Egg with Bamboo and Mammoth Tobacco Pipe

Chris Asteriou has quite a unique approach to design, something undoubtedly informed by his formal education as an architect, his following career in that field, and his experience in industrial design. Chris began his craft with a great admiration for classic Anglo-French marques and the tradition of Old World pipe design. As he continued, however, his awareness of the Danish and Japanese schools grew, as did his fascination with them, leading to pieces with more implied momentum, more softness, and more organicism about their builds. This bent Egg is an impressive display of that influence, displaying a distinctly Danish aesthetic.

This is certainly one of the more understated renditions of the shape which Chris has presented us with, calling to mind certain iterations of the Acorn as crafted by Sixten Ivarsson. The subtlety and reservedness of this pipe's silhouette lend it an air of placid charm, something tempered by the bowl's easy forward cant and the stummel's sweeping curve through the fore. Said bowl rests atop a lifted heel, the forward urge it undertakes pushing its curves into prominence and slightly angling its mid-set waistline. This waist offers the fingers an easy indexing point and marks the afts wall with a decided bulge, a supple outcropping of briar that lends the bowl a more defined roundness in profile. From here the walls of the bowl taper upward toward a chamfered rim that overlooks a respectable chamber.

The transition here is wide, with plenty of room for draping a digit as it gives way to a trim, sleekly tapered shank that then meets a band of black vulcanite. At this point, Asteriou has fitted the shank with a flaring accent of pale bamboo, comprising a single knuckle of the pale grass that acts as a ferrule to fit the stem. Asteriou has crafted the stem with a metal tenon for added strength and has reinforced the shank as well, lining the bamboo's portion of the draft hole with metal and ensuring that the junction is as robust as possible. Not satisfied to accent his work solely with bamboo, the Greek artisan has carved a small disc of mammoth which fits inside the nodule present on the right flank of the bamboo, subtly elevating this piece and drawing the eye toward the nodule's channel: one which Chris has extended into the shank slightly to meld the two disparate materials stylistically. Dressed in a vibrant contrast stain, this pipe is wrapped with an uninterrupted band of cross grain, as flame through the flanks of the shank reorients itself at the bowl, making the fore and aft walls of the bowl basins of dense birdseye.