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.