I recently had the opportunity to chat with Sykes Wilford about the latest release from Savinelli, Unica pipes. These striking, classic pipes showcase Savinelli's aesthetic through a dark burgundy rustication and a stunning blue acrylic stem, rendered in eight shapes.

[Andy Wike]: Hi everybody. I'm Andy Wike. I'm back at it again today for another episode of "All Pipes Considered," joined by Mr. Sykes Wilford.

[Sykes Wilford]: Hey everyone.

[AW]: Thanks for joining us today. We're going to be talking about something super special that is new from Savinelli, and that is the Unica series. So Sykes, if you could just give us a little bit of a background on this series itself and how it came about, since I know that you had a personal hand in developing this one.

[SW]: Yeah. So back in January, I was at the Savinelli factory, and Sonia Revolta, who's the CEO of Savinelli, myself, and a couple of other people were sort of poking through some different things in the factory. My attention was caught by a section of their bowl inventory that didn't quite look like standard Savinelli shapes. Immediately I realized that they were old, limited editions. I recognized them once I got closer. They were utilized for the Collection and Leonardo pipes and some other things that they had done as limited-edition one-offs over the last 30 or 40 years, however long.

They had a few dozen to a few hundred of each of these. So we worked through and curated a selection of these eight shapes. And they're all pretty big in size. They're bigger than most Savinelli pipes and it's still classic Savinelli design language. So we put them together in one little series, all rusticated.

Sonia then suggested we use these beautiful blue stems in the spigot configuration that were originally used for the Eleganza series. While acrylic has been used before, it's never been used as a classic flush-mount stem except occasionally on Savinelli Autographs and things like that. So presenting a whole series with this colored stem in a flush mount is pretty exciting to me, at least because I really like this blue.

[AW]: Oh, it's a great blue. I think a lot of people will agree with that. I mean, Eleganza was super popular. And I think it's really cool here, with the hand-bent stems, matching that profile and to really see it taking up more of that visual real estate is super cool, especially with the darker burgundy, red, ruby rustication that's applied to all of these.

[SW]: Oh yeah, the red stain with the blue stem is just really classy. I really like it.

[AW]: Yeah, it's really nice, especially with the nickel band serving as a buffer in between those. And then the classic Savinelli shield on top of all this was a great idea.

[SW]: The band was also a Sonya idea.

[AW]: I have to say that she has some pretty great ideas. She's awesome.

[SW]: Oh yeah, she does. She's really good with the stem colors and pairing colors together.

[AW]: That's rad. That's super cool.

[SW]: I've done a lot of that over the last decade. With her, it's just fun watching her work because she'll pull this stuff together intuitively whereas I have to sit and really think about it and visually place them next to each other.

[AW]: That's like a whole different level. Being in this industry, those things have become second nature to us, but running a factory is even more the case. Being able to make those decisions very quickly I think is really a testament.

[SW]: At this point, the story on this series is that it is limited by the availability of these bowls. So we're going to keep rolling with this as long as we can. There's different availability for different shapes, so some of the shapes are going to disappear. We're going to run out of some bowls sooner than others. They're really cool, and it's a very reasonable price for a large Savinelli like this.

[AW]: Yeah, and it's also a chance to acquire shapes that don't exist in the normal Savinelli catalog. These shapes have a really nice finish, one of what I think is the best stem colors that Savinelli's ever made. It's just a really killer series overall. Especially if you're into larger or oversized pipes, like the Autograph or 320KS size, these will be right up your alley.

[SW]: Yeah. Well, thank you everybody. This has been fun. Thanks for asking me to do this, Andy.

[AW]: Yeah, of course, and thank you guys for watching. Check out the Savinelli Unica pipes on-site now and we'll catch you next time.