Lars Ivarsson

Lars Ivarsson (c. 1944 – 11 February 2018) was a Danish pipe maker, son of Sixten Ivarsson, and the second-generation representative of the handmade pipe tradition.

Within the line known as the Danish school, his name is remembered for tightening the methods he inherited from his father down to the level of measurement and proportion; a number of details that look ordinary today — the shank's cross-section, the turn of the chamber rim, the continuity of the air channel — are in part traced back to him.

Growing Up at the Bench

His birth year is not clearly recorded; being seventy-three at his death, and being shown as fifty-one in 1996, together point to 1944-45. His childhood passed alongside his father's bench in Copenhagen, and he earned his pocket money there doing small tasks. Accounts differ on the age at which this work began: one account gives eight, while another, based on Ivarsson's own words, gives twelve. In 1969 he finished a business degree at the University of Copenhagen, but he did not leave the bench. By the late 1960s three people worked at the workshop: Sixten, Lars, and Jess Chonowitsch, who had joined Sixten around then. This arrangement broke up when Chonowitsch left in 1970 to set up his own workshop.

In later years Lars preferred rural living. In the mid-1990s he bought a coastal house about a hundred kilometers from Copenhagen and set up his workshop next to it; records listing Danish makers give his address as Nykøbing. Annual output in the same period is given as around seventy pipes.