Marchetti Pipes (Philip S. DeFant)

Marchetti Pipes is the name given to the pipes Philip S. DeFant makes one at a time on his bench in Michigan. The workshop never moved into mass production and has remained limited in number; under the same roof, DeFant has also taken on cleaning and restoration work for old pipes. The resulting style is generally described as a meeting of three currents: the American bench tradition, Italian sensitivity to form, and the flowing lines of the Danish School.

Origin of the Name

The brand carries not its founder's surname but a name the family brought from Italy. According to the story, the original spelling of the surname was Marchetti; after the family, working as stonemasons, emigrated to America and settled in the mining region of northern Michigan, it entered the records as Marketty. Sources diverge on which relative the name should be traced to: one account points to grandfather Philip Marketty, who mined iron in the town of Negaunee in Marquette County and also collected pipes, saying the brand was named in his memory; another account ties the name directly to the maiden name of DeFant's mother. The two accounts do not contradict each other: since the founder's own surname is DeFant, it would follow that the name Marketty came into the family through the maternal line.

Style, Material, and Stamp

The shape repertoire ranges from classic dimensions to freehand lines; fine transitions in the shank and soft ridge lines are considered the brand's recognizable trait. According to manufacturer directory records, the blocks come from two separate regions — briar sourced from Northern Italy and Calabria — while the mouthpieces are worked from Italian or German ebonite rod. The same records cite the brand's distinguishing mark as the oval white dot found on both the top and bottom of the mouthpiece.

Mentorship and Aftermath

DeFant's guide in pipe making was the Michigan-based master Lee von Erck. The two men's acquaintance dates back to DeFant's school years, through the ice hockey team von Erck coached; in later years, DeFant would spend time in the master's workshop on every return home. According to Pipedia, he joined von Erck on a working trip to Japan in the early 2000s, and a significant share of what he produced during that period reached collectors through a specialist retailer in Japan. In a November 2003 interview, when asked about the most promising young masters of the day, von Erck named DeFant as one of two names he gave from North America; today the brand is considered one of the examples of this generation within the American handmade pipe scene of the 2000s.

After the family's first child was born in 2007, the time available for the bench narrowed. The exact year regular production stopped is not clearly stated in the record; the available information points to the late 2000s. In the following period, it is known that only individual pipes were made at the request of longtime customers, and the brand's website has also been offline for years. Some basic details, such as the year the workshop was founded, do not appear in any source.