Former: Smooth Bent Dublin with Horn Tobacco Pipe

With 60 years of pipe-making experience, Hans "Former" Nielsen is revered as a master of the Danish tradition and remains a veritable living legend. Nielsen's shaping, engineering, and finishing have become standards within the industry, with many younger pipe makers traveling to his workshop in Denmark to glean from his years of knowledge and experience. When he was just 15, Former was hired to repair pipes in Poul Rasmussen's Copenhagen pipe shop, and it was a transformative experience for Nielsen, allowing him to study a pipe's internal engineering and learning how it could be improved. He would then go on to work for W.Ø. Larsen, refining his skills, overseeing quality control, and training new carvers that joined the workshop. It was during that time that Nielsen built a workshop in his home and has been crafting Danish classics and Freehand-inspired designs ever since, with this composition continuing that tradition.

This bent Dublin is a sinuous, Freehand-inspired piece that showcases Former's versatile style and meticulous attention to detail. The composition displays an emphasis on the fore of the design, placing a tall, dramatically tapered bowl atop a firmly spurred heel. Said bowl's walls flare wide at the rim, making the most of its craggy plateau crown, which is chamfered to allow for easier filling of its generous chamber. Out back, a defined transition gives way to a sleek and upswept round shank, capped with a flared horn mount at its junction to a deeply bent saddle stem of black vulcanite. These elements combine to create a free-flowing piece that represents a deeply refined interpretation of the Danish Freehand tradition. Dressed in a rich auburn finish, the stummel boasts impressive flame grain all around the bowl, with touches of birdseye at the svelte heel.