db Design Berlin MARITIM Luxe Handmade 162 Smooth Straight Billiard

This reference example is a smooth straight billiard from db Design Berlin, presented within the maker's MARITIM Luxe handmade series and carrying the shape number 162. The billiard is the foundational shape of the classical pipe canon: a cylindrical bowl set at right angles to a straight shank of roughly equal length, prized for its balance and for the direct, uncomplicated line it draws from bit to bowl. In its smooth finish, as here, the shape places the emphasis entirely on proportion and surface, with no rustication or carving to interrupt the form. The pipe is drilled for the 9mm filter, the system that has dominated German and Central European pipe making since the mid-twentieth century. A 9mm shank accepts a disposable charcoal or paper filter cartridge seated in the mortise, a construction convention so pervasive in the German trade that its presence is itself a useful marker of a pipe's intended market. Design Berlin, stamped here with its 'db' device, is a German pipe manufacturer whose output has included both series-produced shapes and lines designated as handmade, of which the MARITIM Luxe stamping on this example is one; the additional 'Handmade' mark distinguishes such pieces from the firm's standard machine-assisted production. Dating rests on the stampings alone. The record therefore assigns an honest working bracket of the late twentieth to early twenty-first century, consistent with the brand's period of activity and the 9mm configuration, while leaving a precise year undetermined. The pipe is retained in the archive as a representative document of German filter-pipe production in the classic billiard form.