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Vintage Jens Quistgaard Dansk Salt & Pepper Mill in Teak. Salt from the top and pepper comes out of the bottom while turning the tọp.
Despite its elegant shape, the Chess Queen is an imposing peppermill. This design is one of the taller JHQ mills. Combined with a fairly large diameter, the size of this mill is particularly expressed when the item is held. Most of the JQH mills of this height have sections that are quite a bit thinner - this mill is wide throughout. Never underestimate a queen’s power.
This mill belongs to a group of JHQ designs with a traditional inflection. It joins the Oval Tab, Heart, Rook, and a few others, drawing references to pre-modern decorative shapes with beads, rosettes, and a few other shapes with more esoteric names (cavetto? congé? scotia? all the fun party guests). The Chess Queen could technically be thought of as a Bowtie: two conical segments meeting as their thinnest point. In this design, the connection between the two cones is decorated with a series of elements that reference traditional woodworking details. From our cursory research into traditional wood profiles, we believe the shapes can be most accurately described as two beads (those would be mill’s the two donuts) in between two cavettos (the curves that join the donuts to the cones). Altogether, this mill also reminds us of a traditional stair baluster. No doubt JHQ would have been keenly aware that this design reads as perhaps his most traditionally influenced peppermill.
At the top of the mill, six salt holes surround a salt loading hole, closed by a modestly sized mushroom plug. Pepper is loaded via the mill’s underside. This design spins around a joint underneath its lower donut, creating an imperceptible connection between the two halves of the mill. Starting with the transitional grinder generation, we’ve observed this peppermill in all subsequent grinders. Notable differences in the mill’s proportions can be seen in every generation - the relationship between the top and bottom lobes of the mill drifts towards the mill appearing top-heavy, the curvature of the design’s cavettos go through a series of simplifications, and the overall mill becomes substantially shorter.
This mill's model number is in conflict with either the Single Lip Mushroom or the Double Lip Mushroom (who's model numbers appear to be used interchangeably). Our theory is that #832 belonged to the Double Lip Mushroom, which appears to have gone out of production by the time the Chess Queen arrived.
This mill was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2003 and is one of the only examples we could find of an American museum collection holding a teak JHQ peppermill.
Dimensions: Coming soon.
