Sixten Ivarsson

Sixten Ivarsson (1910-2001) was a Swedish-born pipe maker who worked in Copenhagen. His legacy lies less in individual pipes than in method: he placed at the center of his bench a hand-shaping technique that freed the bowl from the symmetry imposed by the lathe, and in the same years supplied models for a factory's mass production. In this way, pipe making in Denmark became both a craft capable of standing on its own and a design language recognizable from a distance; today it is regarded as the starting point of what is called the Danish school.

From Repair Shop to Independent Bench

According to records, he was born in the Skåne region of southern Sweden and settled in Copenhagen in the mid-1930s. The war had halted the entry of English and French-made pipes into the Danish market; the pipes people already owned were repaired again and again, and repair shops worked at an unusual pace. Ivarsson entered the trade under these conditions, at a repair shop called Suhr's; for years he did nothing but repairs, then began making new pipes on the same bench. The reason he left Suhr's was a disagreement with the workshop owner over how to share the royalty arising from shapes he had supplied to a pipe factory. When he opened his own workshop in the early 1950s, he became, according to records, the first person in Denmark to do this work independently.

Shapes Transferred to the Factory

Once word spread that new pipes were also being made at the workshop, his clientele widened; one of these was Poul Nielsen, who ran a small manufacturing operation in the countryside. Nielsen wanted to adapt Ivarsson's shapes for machine production, and a collaboration lasting more than forty years began. It is said that part of the shapes in the first regular catalogue of the Stanwell brand were the product of this partnership. The technical precondition for this was the copy-milling machines the factory acquired in the late 1940s: without lathes able to replicate a hand-shaped example exactly, it would not have been possible to carry the master's established proportions into mass production.

The Lathe, Freehand, and Necessary Materials

It is reported that until roughly 1957 he turned his bowls on a lathe, a method that by its nature produces circular, symmetrical bodies. Afterward he switched to shaping the bowl by hand against a rotating sanding disc. This technique, called freehand, allows the maker to follow the grain of briar and build asymmetrical, sculptural bodies; Ivarsson is considered the first master to regularly produce pipes designed this way. He is also credited with the idea of leaving the unworked bark at the upper rim of the chamber intact rather than cutting it away; this is the precursor of the plateau-top pipes that became widespread in the 1960s.

In the same years, briar was hard to come by. Ivarsson made full use of the material by cutting two or three bowls from a single block. This inevitably meant shorter shanks, and he completed the missing length with bamboo, buffalo horn, and bone. This solution born of scarcity gradually became a recognized part of his style.

Students and Stamp

From the early 1960s onward he trained apprentices: his son Lars Ivarsson grew up in the workshop, in later years Jess Chonowitsch and Jørn Micke worked there, and in the late 1980s his grandson Nanna Ivarsson joined the bench. The Swedish maker Bo Nordh also developed his approach to form after coming into contact with Ivarsson.

After becoming independent, he marked his pipes with the stamp "an Ivarsson product" arranged in a ring. It is reported that until around 1965 numbers were also struck inside the ring, with the leading one or two digits indicating the pipe's class and the final digit the year of production counted from 1950; in the later period the stamp carried only the year. It is said he made his last pipes in 1993-94.