Nanna Ivarsson

Nanna Ivarsson (b. 5 April 1974) is a Danish pipe maker and the third generation of makers in the Ivarsson family. Granddaughter of Sixten Ivarsson and the younger of Lars Ivarsson's two daughters, Nanna represents one of the rare cases where the same bench and the same stamp have continued unbroken across three generations. She is spoken of as the living continuation of the Danish School line.

The Handing Down of the Tools

What defines Nanna Ivarsson's professional standing is less a surname than a concrete inheritance: the hand tools and benches her grandfather collected over a lifetime came down to her. This handover did not happen automatically. After giving up an industrial-design career to return to pipes, she went back to being an apprentice for a year in her father's workshop; only at the end of that period did Lars pass Sixten's equipment on to his daughter. In this way the tooling from the founding years of Danish pipe making continued to work in the hands of the third generation.

An Early Start and Education

Nanna grew up while the family lived in the countryside and, according to records, sold her first self-made pipe at the age of nine — an unusually early start for the trade. In her teenage years her work began reaching buyers outside Denmark, in Germany and Japan, and the young maker was featured on national television.

At eighteen she moved to Copenhagen and apprenticed under her grandfather Sixten Ivarsson. After Sixten fell ill she ran the workshop alone for a while, then began a five-year industrial-design program at the Danish Design School. Though she worked two years in that field after graduating, she chose pipe making as her profession.

Workshop and Style

In 2007 she moved to Brooklyn, New York; her lathe and other equipment were shipped over from Denmark. A visit back to the country, during which she met the person she would marry, cut this period short. Today she lives and works in a small town south of Copenhagen, near the coast. Her annual output is low; according to a piece published in 2012, she had made more than five hundred pipes in her career up to that point.

Her sense of form rests on the family's proportional tradition, but it also carries the mark of her design training. Blowfish, acorn, and long-shank arrangements are among the shapes she works often. She is known to use materials such as bamboo and horn as spacers alongside briar.

Stamps

Her pipes carry the family's shared ring-shaped "an Ivarsson product" stamp; the mark distinguishing the maker herself is the letters "N.I." She also continues her father's practice of striking a fish stamp on work he considered flawless in every respect. This stamp is reportedly used on average only once every few years, so fish-stamped examples occupy a separate place in the eyes of collectors.

Her son, born in October 2008, was given the name Sixten in memory of his great-grandfather. Whether the Ivarsson line will extend to a fourth generation remains, for now, an open question.