His arrival the Jura plant produced 400000 pipes per year

Antoine Grenard and his large two sisters grew up in the middle of Meerschaum bruyère and the spirals of smoke. Inherited from the turning by the monks, present here as early as the 5th century, the manufacture of this strange object of the smoker peaked at Saint-Claude (Jura) pre-war, with more than 100 factories, only four still exist today. The brotherhood of the master pipiers, who together since the 1960s, is still 12 marks, and among them Chacom and Ropp, that manufactures Chapuis-Comoy, Grenard family business.

Parents of Antoine, each year, it was the excitement at the enthronement of the first France pipe smoker. Too young to have known the first, the Jean Richard or Henri Verneuil, who took the suite of Edgar Faure, the first of the first, in 1966, he remembers no doubt still came to Saint-Claude de Bertrand Blier, Claude Chabrol, Nino Ferrer or Jacques Audiard, in the 1980s and 1990s. Antoine Grenard has perhaps even smoked a good mixture of tobacco in the company of Jean-Claude Magloire or Jean-Louis Bruguière, first smokers of the 2000s. Because, from the top of his thirty-one years, the new manager of the maison Chapuis-Comoy already has a long experience behind him, because he is secretly initiated the ritual at the age where others still play to small cars. "My first pipes had no tobacco." "It was pipes that dragged my parents and I was putting in the mouth to make as large," he says immediately.

Representing the sixth generation of family Comoy, of which the first, Henri, went to London in 1870 to create the parent - the English were heavy smokers of pipe and good traders-, Antoine Grenard succeeded his father, Yves, in 2007. Had bought the shares of the mill of Saint-Claude in 1970, just after having spent two years in London. His arrival, the Jura plant produced 400,000 pipes per year. It did manufactures more than 80,000, but always in the rules of art, hand. "I saw the market collapse of the late 1970s and early 1980s," remembers Yves Grenard. To cope with the slump of the product, threatened with obsolescence, he then attempted a diversification in automotive subcontracting, Volvo and Renault, who lâchèrent the late 1990s. Are pipes, a true know-how, a team of 26 employees, a building and valuable equipment dating from the beginning of the 20th century, intact.

The arrival of Antoine Grenard, in 2007, symbolizes the renewal. Party study in an IUT of mechanics in Besançon, he quickly bifurcated to the school of design of Valenciennes, then worked at the Agency Ora-Ito, in Paris, before to return to the family factory. Since his return a new wind blows: spherical pipes or with ring aluminium, revisited classics, a touch of design in packaging.

Two fingers of design, of course, to seduce the collectors around the world and sharpen the creativity of the new master pipier, but the business and the actions remain.

On the second floor of the huge plant - it has counted up to 200 employees - built in hillside, at Saint-the centre of Claude, bags of design are waiting to be sorted. These parts bruyère, precious raw material from the Morocco or Algeria, will have to be dried, and then calibrated, sawn, before moving on to the machine to draft, before one of the large Windows. There, fine bruyère chips fly as butterflies, subtle smelling of spicy wood. There is then the step and varlopage, to turn the stem, then drilling, Freehand. This workshop there is that of men. "When the pipe out of the drafting, it has a stem, a home and it descends to the grating, where it will be polished," says Françoise Morel, responsible for managing the steps editing, polishing and thinning on the first floor, more feminine.

Some lower steps, after the shipping service, where cartons are ready to go to China, Egypt or Dubai - export represents 50 of net sales of EUR 1.3 million, all models are archived, the oldest in the wildest, lacquered or veined, vintage or not. Creativity is the brand name of Saint-Claude pipes, which the cave of Ali Baba is, somehow, vault.