Thunér Pipes (Ronny Thunér)

Thunér Pipes is the name of the one-man workshop founded by Swedish pipe maker Ronny Thunér (b. 1968) in early 2005. Thunér came to the craft late in his thirties, well after most of his Scandinavian peers, yet within a few years had made a name for himself among the pipe makers of his country. He also works classic shapes, but his true identity lies in his freehand pieces.

Entering the Craft

What is known about how Thunér turned to pipe making rests largely on an account in his own words; no independent record of this period exists. As he tells it, during a long period of treatment and recovery his broken pipe needed replacing, and unable to find a new one he liked, he ordered two ready-made hobby kits online. Both attempts proved unusable. The real turning point came when he wrote to the Swedish Pipe Club (Svenska Pipklubben) asking for help: the club gave him the names of reliable briar suppliers and introduced him to Scandinavian makers.

Mentors and Training

Seeing his first rough attempts, Bengt Carlson offered to mentor Thunér in both craftsmanship and design, and his formal training began there. Records indicate he also drew directly on the workshops of Love Geiger, Martin Vollmer, Anders Nilsson, Tom Eltang, and Søren Refbjerg — work that spanned Denmark and southern Sweden. The spread of names across two countries reflects the lineage the workshop is tied to: an emphasis on precise proportion and internal craftsmanship over ornamentation, shaped largely by the Danish school. By his own account, Thunér also earned Sweden's rarely-pursued formal pipe-making diploma during these years.

Formal Language

Thunér's work falls into two groups. On one side are shapes faithful to classic proportions, such as billiard, rhodesian, and similar forms; on the other are the freehand pieces that form the workshop's true signature. His freehand method treats the grain flow of the block as the design's starting point, for which he says he selects aged plateau briar from the Mediterranean belt. The shape he calls Cobra is the best-known example of this group: as its name suggests, it is a slender, long-bodied freehand with a long stem. His second distinguishing choice is applying rustic surface treatment not only to the bowl but to the stem as well — an unusual choice in a craft where the stem is almost always polished smooth.

Recognition and Current Status

Production has always been a one-man, limited affair, with pipes circulating largely through the international collector network. Accessible records end in the late 2000s, and independent sources cannot confirm at what pace the workshop operates today, or whether production continues at all. For this reason the name is associated more with pieces made in the 2000s than with any current output.