Tonni Nielsen

Tonni Nielsen is a Danish pipe maker who trained in Copenhagen and has spent most of his career in the United States. He is known for original shapes that follow the grain of the wood rather than classic proportions; his work is placed within the second generation of the Danish school tradition.

Apprenticeship at the Larsen Workshop

He entered the trade at sixteen, taken on at the workshop of W.Ø. Larsen, Copenhagen's storied pipe house. By his own account he was born in Copenhagen in 1953, and had considered going into tool-and-die making before giving up the idea. After a preparatory period of about three years, he began producing his own fantasy and straight-grain pipe designs under the Larsen roof. He counts bench colleagues Hans "Former" Nielsen and Teddy Knudsen as his mentors; in later years he himself taught pipe making to young makers who joined the workshop.

The W.Ø. Larsen workshop was one of the centers that trained masters in Danish pipe making in the 1970s, and Nielsen's generation is largely associated with these benches. Records indicate he founded his own business in 1978. From that point on, while sending pipes signed under his own name to various countries, he also continued supplying part of his production to W.Ø. Larsen.