Malaga Pipe Company

Malaga Pipe Company is an American pipe workshop founded around 1939 by George Khoubesser in Royal Oak, Michigan, a town next to Detroit, which operated for sixty years from a single address, in a small shop on East Eleven Mile Road. The brand is an example of a model that sat between large American factories running mass production and one-person artisan workshops: pipes were made in the back workshop and sold in the front showcase.

Founding and Two Generations

Founder George Khoubesser had set the business up as both a manufacturing shop and a retail store; community sources give his birth and death years as 1892 and 1971, though these dates have not been confirmed by an independent record. In the second generation, the business was taken over by Emmanuel Khoubesser, known to customers as "Manny" (per the same sources, 1942-1981). The shop's operation followed the typical pattern of a neighborhood workshop: production ran through the week in the back workshop, and completed shapes were moved to the display case toward the weekend. Alongside briar pipes, the shop also sold tobacco, both blends mixed on-site and packaged products. After Manny's death in 1981, the business passed to his wife and older children. Malaga closed in 1999 at the end of sixty years of operation. The building at the shop's address still stands today and is used by another business.