Trey Rice Pipes

Trey Rice Pipes is the one-person bench of Trey Rice, who works in and around Fort Worth, Texas. Rice continues his primary career in architecture full-time; he makes pipes alongside it, on a part-time basis. It is this dual status that defines the workshop's identity: the maker considers the principles that hold up a building and those that bring a briar block to shape to belong to the same family.

Approach to Construction

Production runs entirely by hand. The body is shaped from briar and finished by hand, while the stem is hand-cut from ebonite or Cumberland rod. One of the standards the workshop sets for itself is that a pipe cleaner must be able to pass from the bit through to the bowl on every pipe without catching — a practical test showing the smoke channel is properly aligned.

His shape repertoire is built on personal interpretations of classics; shapes such as prince, bulldog, and lovat recur often, and acorn interpretations also appear in his collections. Rice's style is described as sitting somewhere with an American body, a contemporary take on the Danish school, and a share of classic English taste as well. The maker's own emphasis falls on shape, function, proportion, the guiding idea, detail resolution, and durability — standards he carries over from his architectural training and considers equally valid in both fields.

Student Years and First Attempts

Rice's introduction to pipes falls in the summer of 2009, during his time at Texas A&M University; a friend introduced him to pipe smoking while camping. By his own account, since the pipes he had his eye on were beyond a student budget, he tried making his own pipe instead of buying a ready-made one. His prior interest in woodworking made this attempt easier; he gathered his technical knowledge largely from the internet, particularly forums where pipe makers gather. About a year later he began offering his work for sale at a local cigar shop. His six years of undergraduate and graduate study at university were in architecture.

Pause and Restart

Production stopped in 2013 because the small apartment he moved into after school had no room for a workshop. The pause ended when he bought a house in early 2017 and converted a small room adjoining the garage into a woodworking shop. Two developments proved decisive in this second period: a 1970s metal lathe inherited from his grandfather entered the workshop, enabling a finer level of precision in his craftsmanship; and attending pipe shows more often gave him both the chance to examine many pipes up close and to get direct feedback from fellow makers. These two gains built on top of the online learning of his earlier years.