Peterson House Pipe: a Tradition of Oversized Bowls

Peterson House Pipe is the common name for the oversized System pipes that have appeared in the Dublin firm Kapp & Peterson's catalogues for more than a century. The term is not a catalogue name but a usage of the community itself; it describes not a single model but a size class.

Where the name came from is not documented with certainty: the common explanation is that these pipes were too large to be carried in a pocket for use during the day and were therefore smoked at home; some sources instead trace the name to a broader tradition of long-stemmed home pipes.

Origins in the Catalogue Record

In Peterson's catalogues, oversized System pipes go back as far as 1896. In the 1896 and 1906 lists these pipes were given under the heading "Extra Large Size"; in later catalogues they were numbered with the prefix O, for oversize. This first generation consists of three shapes: O1, O2, and O3. According to records, the largest is O2 and the smallest O3; O2 is also the one most often encountered on the collector market. O1 is said to have been Charles Peterson's own preferred shape, with one example reportedly kept by his daughter Isolde and donated to the firm by her heirs in the early 1990s.

These shapes remained Peterson's largest System pipes until the Hand Made System series appeared in the late 1980s. The catalogue trail breaks off at the 1922 interim price list; against that, a great many examples belonging to the Irish Free State period (1922-1937) have been documented.