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6 photographsArchive Record FUH-KPAP-HCQW-F
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
No
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 straight billiard bearing the stamp MONTEBELLO together with the line designation Deluxe and the shape number 987. The bowl is finished in a sandblast, the textured treatment in which the softer growth rings of the wood are cut away under abrasive pressure, leaving the harder grain standing in relief. Sandblasting became a respected finish across twentieth-century pipe production, prized both for the tactile character it lends a bowl and for the way it reveals the underlying grain structure rather than concealing it.
The billiard is the foundational shape of the classical pipe canon: a cylindrical bowl set at roughly a right angle to a straight shank, with the shank length traditionally approximating the height of the bowl. In its straight configuration, as here, it represents the most conservative and enduring silhouette in the catalogue tradition, the form against which most other shapes are defined and measured. The presence of a three-digit shape number is itself instructive — numbered shape charts were the organising system of factory pipe production, allowing a house to reproduce a silhouette consistently across grades and finishes, with a designation such as Deluxe marking a particular tier within the range.
Dating rests on the documentary evidence of the stampings themselves: the brand name, the Deluxe line marking, and the 987 shape number. The Montebello name does not correspond to a widely published factory chronology or date-code system of the kind maintained by houses such as Dunhill, and shape-numbered production of this style spans many decades of twentieth-century manufacture. The honest conclusion, therefore, is that the piece belongs to the broad tradition of catalogued factory billiards, and its era is recorded here as undetermined pending corroborating documentation. It is preserved in the archive as a representative example of the sandblast straight billiard form under the Montebello Deluxe marking.
2022-11-27
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2022-11-27.
2022-12-07
Sold through Etsy for USD 35. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
5 checklist facts recorded under Faridunhill's standing declaration of shop practice (2026-07-29).
This record is append-only. Nothing is deleted — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both stay visible.
USD 35sold 2022-12-07 · 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 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, 2022-11-27. 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.