Loading
Loading
6 photographsArchive Record FUH-5GY3-838N-3
undetermined
Reference example
This pipe is documented here as an example for study — it is a record in the archive, not an item offered for sale. Everything below is what the piece itself, and the evidence around it, will honestly support.
Original stem
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Stem replaced or re-cut
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Rim cleaned (no wood removed)
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Refinished
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Chamber reamed
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Smoked
Yes
owner stated
Facts, not a grade. We do not score a pipe out of ten: a number would rank a restored pipe above an honest one, and restoration is exactly what this hobby prices down. Every line above is checkable by anyone holding the pipe. Lines marked Faridunhill standing declaration rest on our published, dated statement of shop practice (v1.0, 2026-07-29) — not on an inspection of this individual pipe. It is one document, in public, that you can hold us to.
This reference example documents a Jean Lacroix pipe from the Nizza de Luxe line, a smooth-finished billiard of French origin, carrying the grade designation Bruyere Extra Fine. The word bruyère is simply the French term for — the burl of the tree heath, Erica arborea — and its use as a stamped quality marking reflects a long-standing convention among French houses, where graded bruyère designations such as 'Extra' or 'Extra Fine' signalled the selection of the wood rather than a separate material. France holds a foundational place in pipe history: the industry centred on Saint-Claude in the Jura is widely credited with pioneering pipe manufacture in the mid-nineteenth century, and French factories supplied both domestic brands and export trade names in enormous volume through the twentieth century. Jean Lacroix belongs to this French production tradition, with the Nizza de Luxe stamping marking a named line within the brand's output. The billiard is the most fundamental of all pipe shapes — a cylindrical bowl set at roughly a right angle to a straight shank of approximately equal length, valued as the benchmark form against which a maker's discipline is judged, since its plain geometry leaves no ornament to disguise the work. Dating this example rests on the brand and line stampings themselves rather than any factory code: French makers of this type did not employ systematic date-coding, so a pipe is placed in time by the style of its nomenclature, its construction, and comparison with documented examples. The pipe is preserved here as a documented instance of French graded-bruyère production in the classic billiard form.
2023-01-08
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2023-01-08.
2023-03-30
Sold through Etsy for USD 47. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
5 checklist facts recorded under Faridunhill's standing declaration of shop practice (2026-07-29).
2026-08-28
Honesty pass: statements the source does not support were removed (parts.bowl_material 'briar' removed; 1 unsupported/absence sentence(s) removed from the essay).
2026-08-28
Honesty pass: statements the source does not support were removed (3 unsupported/absence sentence(s) removed from the essay).
This record is append-only. Nothing is deleted — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both stay visible.
USD 47sold 2023-03-30 · Etsy
From 1 recorded sale — this pipe, this day. A single transaction is not a market price, and we will never print one as if it were.
The sample this sits in: Faridunhill has recorded 79 sales of Jean Lacroix between 2015–2026 — median $37, most falling between $25 and $56.
The date shown is the date of sale, not the date this page was published. Our own transaction record, published free. No buyer appears here — not a name, not initials, not a country. Counted across both of our channels — eBay 2015–2022 and Etsy 2022–2026 — so the series is continuous and a change of marketplace is never read as a change in price.
Nobody leaves empty-handed. If you hold the catalogue page, the dated advertisement, or a hallmarked sibling that closes one of these — or simply own this model and can measure yours — send it in. Contributions are checked, credited to you by name, and the record is updated with the date it changed.
Instagram post, 2023-01-08. Published to a third-party platform on that date and archived since — a timestamp we cannot move. It is evidence that this object existed and looked like this, then.
The photographs are the identity. 6 images of this pipe's grain, stamping and stem are held as its fingerprint. The handle above is only a handle: lose it, and the pipe can still be matched back to this record from its grain.