Elie Bleu Snowy Owl Humidor — 110 Cigars

Elie Bleu Snowy Owl Humidor — 110 Cigars

The snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus) is a creature of contrast: white against the Arctic expanse, still against the wind, visible at distance in an environment designed to conceal everything else. It is also, crucially, a nocturnal hunter — the night its territory, the dark its operating condition. Both qualities make it a natural subject for Elie Bleu's Birds of Prey marquetry series, where the challenge is not to produce an image of an animal but to render one in wood and shell with the specificity that a static medium demands. The Snowy Owl humidor is limited to 200 numbered pieces in the 110-cigar format.

Marquetry and Materials

The composition places the snowy owl against a dark background of grey-stained redgum — a warm Australian eucalyptus whose natural ribbon figure, given the grey staining, takes on the quality of bark seen at night, of the edge of a forest in low light. The owl itself is built from blue and white-stained sycamore: the blue registers the atmospheric shadow of the bird's wing markings, the white the pale body plumage that is the snowy owl's signature. The veneer orientation throughout is chosen to evoke depth — the sense that the forest recedes behind the figure, that the owl occupies real space within the composition.

The most precise elements are left to the hardest material. The beak and talons — the points of the bird's predatory precision — are rendered in black mother-of-pearl, which holds its edge in marquetry in a way wood cannot. The eyes are black and orange-stained sycamore, the contrast carrying even when the rest of the composition draws the eye toward the broader scene.

Emily Dickinson

On the front face of the humidor, a line from Emily Dickinson's poem Wild Nights has been chosen and placed by the atelier. The choice is deliberate: the poem's language — its "wild nights," its "futile winds," its suggestion of a world operating outside the orderly daylight register — maps onto the snowy owl's world as much as it does onto the romantic subject Dickinson intended. The Faubourg Saint-Antoine workshop selected it specifically for the richness of its resonances: words that evoke the night the snowy owl inhabits and a deeper, more turbulent intensity stretched between harshness and beauty.

Construction

Inside: Spanish cedar throughout, 2 humidifiers, 1 analog needle hygrometer, removable cedar dividers, lock and key closure. The exterior carries the full marquetry composition across the lid and sides. Dimensions: 48.5 × 27.0 × 10.5 cm (19.1 × 10.6 × 4.1 in) — a format wider than the standard Elie Bleu 110-cigar body, providing the marquetry composition the horizontal scope it requires. Limited to 200 numbered pieces worldwide. Made in France.

Now available at The Tobacconist of Greenwich.