Savinelli 150th Anniversary Capri Pipes transcript

Hey, everybody, I'm Shane Ireland. And I'm Sykes Wilford. And we're here today to talk about a really fun project with Savinelli. This is a revival of one of their most famous and unique finishes, the Capri. So Sykes, why don't you tell us how this came to be and then we'll talk a little bit about the shape selection and the history of the Capri finish. Yeah. So I've, I have long loved the Capri series and back in 2024, in anticipation of this year, which is Savinelli's 150th anniversary year, they founded in 1876.

So Congratulations, Savinelli. Happy birthday. Sonya, who at the time was, was CEO of Savinelli, said, Hey, we want to do a series of projects or a project around a revival of an old Savinelli series and it's iconic and I'm like, we wanna do the Capri. Capris first thing. And she said, I don't know if we can do that because the rustication they haven't done in years. There was a point where you and I were talking about Capris with them in Italy, this was really early on in my career, and we were told that the, the technique has been lost.

Oh, yeah. That like the person who was doing the rustication historically back in the day basically didn't pass it on and like recreating it was a big endeavor. So, yeah, it seems like they went ahead and like figured it out. Well, I figured if I could twist their arm over it. Yeah. It was gonna be for 150th anniversary. Yes, perfect time to do it. So the Capri series, like a little background here, the Capri series was made from sometime in the 1950s until maybe the early '80s.

Mm-hmm. We don't have exact start and end dates for that. Yep. But it was a really important part of, of Savinelli's portfolio of, of, of finishes for many really important decades in the post-war period. And you still see 'em on the estate market with, with some regularity, like they made a lot of 'em. Mm-hmm. We've had examples that still had the four-digit shape code, which is pre-1970. So for many decades, the only hope as a collector that you had is to find one on the estate market because recreating this finish from the ground up, without the expertise from days past, was gonna be a very labor-intensive endeavor.

It's effectively a compound finish of carving and rustication in a way that, that Savinelli really innovated back in that time period. Yeah, yeah, you see that in, in this series, you see that in the, in the Alligator series. Mm-hmm. The sorts of things that they did with textured pipes, some of which have continued to now. The seasonal rusticated Naturals that come out every year. This, there's, there's this mode of thinking with rustication that, that is special to, to Savinelli.

Yeah. But it's a really, I think one of my favorite things about the Capri is that you have the sort of like really old-school, craggy texture that we associate with a lot of like early 20th century pipes, whether it was rustication or sandblasting, but the way that they apply this finish is really well suited to a lot of different models. Mm-hmm. Like it's kind of easy to make an Apple or a Billiard rusticated uniformly, and over and over and over again.

But when you're talking about a production that Savinelli would've done either back in the day or for the 150th here, there's a lot of variation between something like a 673 and the Opera shape. Yeah. This is a little 901 here. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there, like a finish like this, as complex as it is and as time consuming as it is, applying it to so many different shapes is also a feat. So what about shape selection for this project?

Okay, so, that was one of the things that I was really, really excited about at the beginning of this, and I pushed for a massive number of shapes, 'cause it's what I always do. You know, it's always nice having a 320 and a 606 and a 673. You got 106, 121. Yeah. 504. So you got your like standard Savinelli stalwarts that have been in the catalog the whole time, and then, in front of me, I've got a whole bunch of cool old shapes.

So what what ended up evolving here is that I was asking for all of these different shapes and they're like, we don't know what we can do, we don't know what we can do. And then they went away and they dug around in the factory and they sent me an email about a month later and said, well, we found a bunch that were already rusticated that are just sitting as heads in the factory that we found in a bin. And I'm like, cool.

Perfect. We will take whatever. Yeah. And so we, and all of them are, are sort of oddball old shapes, and we got some, you know, some of 'em, we got two of, some of 'em we got seven of. It wasn't like. Yeah, take whatever you can get. The 901 Opera we were just looking at. 627. 627 is awesome. 627 is so cool. It's like the, yeah, the, the like sort of triangle shank that you see on like the 673 half saddle, like that is, that is one of my favorite shapes that you never find anymore.

Yeah, and the 125 Pot is like a super, at this point, super obscure shape. Uh-huh. But absolutely lovely classic straight Pot that we haven't seen in current production in, in forever. God, the 130 also looks amazing in that finish. Yeah. The sort of bent stack Oval shape. And I love, I love old Savinelli shapes like this, like the super lithe shanks and the tall bowls, and there's just something wonderfully iconic about some of these old shapes that have been lost in.

Looking at that rack is like the, so there's that sort of later period that would've started, I think maybe more towards like the late '60s, early '70s, and into the '80s that we sort of think of now as like the neoclassic, like the exaggerated features. Mm-hmm. Stuff that was kind of like really propelled into the mainstream by Castello and Radice and Caminetto and the pipes that they were making at that time, but I feel like this design language here is really what made Italian pipes, coming off of the Anglo-French sort of lead, Yeah. that's really what made them unique and different and desirable at that period.

Like, I don't know, I just love this design language and I think the, the 627 and the 130 are just like excellent examples of it. So what about stem material? So these are all vulcanite stems. They, there was some discussion of that at the beginning, but I like absolutely insisted, these needed to be like they were made back in the 1960s. They pulled out all the stops, they went through all their old stem bins and. Mm-hmm.

And put it together for us, which was particularly impressive, given the odd ballness of some of these shapes. Like trying to find this old stem was probably not easy. Yes, yes, absolutely. So they, they, they really made a big effort to get all of this absolutely right just the way it would've been done 70, 80 years ago. Amazing. So in addition to the vulcanite stems, the old finish, these are three millimeter. Yes, they're all unfiltered.

Mm-hmm. Again, just like they would've been in the 19, in the 1960s. Yeah. I think some of the later ones did have six millimeter filters, but the original series, was. Wouldn't have. Yeah. Wouldn't have. Mm-hmm. Also it let us include a bunch of shapes that you, that they will not put six millimeter filters in because it, it makes the shank, shank walls too thick. You can't, you basically can't do it. Yeah. So it gives us a lot of flexibility to include anything from their, from their shape portfolio that we can make work.

Amazing. A really authentic and fitting celebration for their 150th anniversary, and again, if you're collectors like us who have chased old Capris on the market, the on the estate market for many years, here's your chance to get something. Especially when it comes to some of these shapes here that just will not and cannot return to this series, even if we were very convincing to ask them to do it again at any point in the future.

Yeah. Super cool. An iconic, an iconic finish for an iconic brand and a lot of shapes. Something for everybody. Thanks, everyone, and again, Thank you. happy 150th, Savinelli.